


Please Work With What Is Left

by platoapproved



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Backstory, Betrayal, Canon-Typical Mentions of Abuse, Character Study, Fluff and Angst, Grief/Mourning, Kissing, M/M, Missing Scene, Multi, Murder, Polyamory, Sharing a Bed, Spooning, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-29
Updated: 2017-06-14
Packaged: 2018-04-17 22:37:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 33,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4683908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/platoapproved/pseuds/platoapproved
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This began as a rumination on why Noah, who is so mild, would scratch Ronan during TRB.  From there it spiraled into a longer character study of Noah, mainly focused on his past with Whelk and him dealing with the fallout of all that trauma and betrayal.  Plus, it's a love story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> My thanks to [prosopopeya](http://archiveofourown.org/users/prosopopeya) for being a patient and gracious beta.
> 
> You can find me on tumblr [here](http://platoapproved.tumblr.com/), and the tumblr version of this fic begins [here](http://platoapproved.tumblr.com/post/127902906855/fandom-the-raven-cycle-ships-noahwhelk).
> 
> I also made a [playlist](http://8tracks.com/platoapproved/please-work-with-what-is-left) of songs to accompany this.

_Over time, the ghosts of things that happened start to turn distant; once they’ve cut you a couple of million times, their edges blunt on your scar tissue, they wear thin. The ones that slice like razors forever are the ghosts of things that never got the chance to happen._  
\- Tara French, **Broken Harbor**

The first time Noah and Whelk kissed was in the oak grove by the abandoned church.

The two of them were friendly at Aglionby, of course; they had shared classes and a dorm room for years. Teachers gave them messages for one another; other boys assumed that if they invited Whelk to a party, Czerny would come, too, and vice versa. When Noah’s mother called, she always asked _‘And how is Barrington?’_ , and Whelk’s mother would do the same. But that closeness was functional, institutional, in a way that maintained a distance between them. It wasn’t that they were spied on by any particular person, but even in their dorm room at night, both felt, in some nonspecific but powerful way, _watched._

It wasn’t like that when they went out looking for the ley line. The outskirts of Henrietta—all snaking two lane roads and fields and looming mountains—felt like their own private country, unimaginably distant from school and family. Noah, in particular, relished their shared isolation. Before Aglionby, his outings were all crowded affairs, supervised by teachers or coaches, or else his parents and relatives. He was the oldest of the children, and thus in high demand amongst the small cousins and his younger sisters. Not that he minded, but all the same, being with just Whelk, out in the open, was new. The lack of supervision was exhilarating and latently erotic. 

That morning, Whelk had laughed at him when he tucked a giant, folded picnic blanket in the back of his Mustang, along with the dousing rods and the maps, but he wasn’t laughing now. The two of them were sprawled on that blanket, on the incline of a gentle hill, faces turned up towards the sky. It was a Tuesday, but neither of them remembered that. Classes didn’t start back up for another two weeks. Soon, their lives would be complicated by Trigonometry and tutors and club activities, but for now, there was nothing but sun on their skin, an array of just-emptied fast food cartons, and the scattered cans from a six pack of beer that they had almost finished. It was simple, but together, they felt as hedonistic as emperors.

The rest of their equipment was still in the car, but they weren’t in a hurry. The ley line wasn’t going anywhere. Noah felt warm and full, his limbs heavy and a pleasant haziness buzzing away in his head. He was just thinking he might go to sleep, when a leaf landed on his face. He assumed it had fallen from a tree, until it was followed by a second, and a third and fourth, these ones unquestionably thrown. Noah, too comfortable to remove his hands from behind his head, just tilted his face to the side and let the leaves fall.

“God, you _are_ lazy.”

Noah smiled, “I’m not lazy, I’m chill.”

“Lazy,” Whelk repeated, as if they meant the same thing to him. He’d always been the more assertive of the two of them. The leader. Noah knew that, and he was okay with it. Whelk might have gotten him into some trouble now and then, but he got him into a lot of fun, too. The truth was, he liked being egged on. It was nice to have a friend who ignored his placid nature and, occasionally, made him wild. 

He didn’t know it yet, but this was going to be another of those moments.

“Too lazy to make a move.”

At first, Noah thought Whelk must be talking about the ley line, but then the red glow of the sun coming through his closed eyelids was cut off. He opened his eyes and Whelk was looming over him, on hands and knees, a thin, meanish grin on his face. Noah stared at him as if he didn’t understand, but his throat had gone tight. _Shit._

“I mean, come on, how long have you been pining for me, Czerny? A fucking year?” There was a looseness in the way Whelk spoke that gave away how drunk he was. He’d had most of the beer. “Grow a pair already and do something about it.”

Whelk wasn’t wrong, of course. Noah had been, as he put it, ‘pining’ for quite some time. But he’d resigned himself to it. As far as he was concerned, being friends with Whelk was enough. It wasn’t any particular torment, hiding the part of himself that was attracted to his roommate. He was used to it. Saying anything about it, much less _doing_ anything about it, was not his style. Too many variables, too much potential embarrassment. It would go the way of all his crushes, unspoken, unacknowledged, eventually forgotten.

His face felt hot from beer and sun and awkwardness. Whelk wasn’t moving away. He was goading Noah to either deny it, or kiss him. It would be so simple to just kiss him. But was this a prank? Did Whelk really mean it? Noah’s eyes flicked down to Whelk’s lips, back to his eyes. Was this a test? Some ploy to get ammunition against Noah? Or did he really— could he possibly— ?

“Jesus Christ, you’re hopeless,” Whelk scoffed, and a second later he was kissing Noah, practiced and a touch aggressive. He smelled overwhelmingly of beer. After a few seconds of unmoving surprise, Noah kissed him back. He traced his fingertips through the very fine hairs on the back of Whelk’s neck. It sent a shudder through him, which was very gratifying to Noah, who grinned against Whelk’s mouth.

“Fuck you,” Whelk muttered, and then, low, “do it again.”

Neither of them said another word all afternoon, and they didn’t get around to looking for ley lines, either.

Later, Noah wished it had been somewhere else. Someone else. It would have been nice, to have his first kiss be a bright, idyllic memory, untethered to anything that had happened before or after. It ought to be something he could turn to in the middle of the night, when everyone around him slept, and there was nothing left for him but the past. But when he thought of that kiss, the memory was like a reel of double-exposed film. On one exposure was the scratch of the picnic blanket on his bare back, the roar of the cicadas and the smell of the hot grass, Whelk’s nose bumping his too hard, their little gasps of self-deprecating laughter. But the second exposure was a coldish spring night in that same grove, where kneeling, he tried with broken fingers to block his face, as Whelk stood over him, skateboard gripped in both hands, silently, methodically beating him to death.

“What are you doing?” Gansey asked, leaning with elaborate casualness against the refrigerator. It was what Ronan liked to think of as his ‘dad voice’. Ronan, perched on the edge of the tub, was dabbing antiseptic onto a cluster of long but shallow gashes on his upper arm. They were clearly fingernail marks. There wasn’t much blood, but there was some.

Since it was pretty damn obvious _what_ he was doing, Ronan didn’t bother to respond. He knew that that wasn’t the question Gansey really wanted to ask. Without even looking at him, Ronan was sure Gansey thought he’d scratched himself, and not by accident, and now he was gearing himself up to Say Something. He’d never known Gansey to have a hard time talking about anything, but Gansey had a hard time talking about this. It pissed Ronan off that he wouldn’t just let it go. It wasn’t the idea of being thought suicidal: if that had bothered him, he’d have done something about it by now. It was the fact that Gansey didn’t trust him. Even _if_ Gansey didn’t know the real reason Ronan had had to go to the hospital six months ago, Ronan had given him his word it wouldn’t happen again. That ought to be enough. Did Gansey really think he was a liar, like Declan?

The silence was heavy as lead. Ronan looked up, readying a sarcastic comment about finding Gansey staring at a hornet the other day. _Which one of us is supposed to be suicidal, again?_ But as soon as he saw Gansey’s face, the words vanished. Gansey looked _tired_. He’d always been an insomniac, just like Ronan, but since he’d found Noah’s bones with Blue, Gansey had barely slept at all. Ronan wondered if Gansey had ever seen a dead body before. He remembered what it had been like, right after finding his father. Probably, he should be the one trying to offer support.

But Ronan had already tried to convince Gansey that drinking hard liquor until you passed out was an effective sleep aid, and a lot more fun than it sounded, and Gansey had glared at him. What else was he going to say?

“It wasn’t me,” Ronan said, pre-empting the entire conversation, bored with it already. He unrolled a bandage and started wrapping it around his arm, hissing softly in pain.

“What?”

“I woke up like this.” His Beyoncé reference was lost on Gansey, which shouldn’t have surprised him. It was _Gansey_ , after all. With a small shake of his head, he added, “I’m pretty sure it was Noah.”

Gansey stood up straighter at once. They hadn’t had seen or heard sign of Noah since the night before, when he’d sent a stack of Gansey’s notes and books hurtling to the floor.

“Are you sure?” It wasn’t really a question. Gansey was reaching for straws, and Ronan knew why. It was hard to reconcile the shy, docile Noah they’d known all this time with the bright beads of blood standing out against Ronan’s skin.

Ronan’s mouth was tight. He’d woken up before with injuries that were a gift from his own nightmares, but this was different. The pain had jolted him out of a—for once—dreamless sleep.

“I’m sure.” Then, after a pause, “Can’t really blame him.”

Gansey raised one eyebrow in surprise. Ronan could generally blame anyone. It was one of his specialities.

Ronan taped down the end of the bandage, his jaw tight. “I’m glad he’s angry. Anger’s what—” But he stopped, because he’d been about to say _anger’s what keeps you alive_. They were both still getting used to this. “You weren’t there. You should have fucking heard him, Gansey. He kept making excuses for him.” Ronan put on an affected voice, whimpery and pathetic, an unkind mimicry of Noah, “You don’t get it, he was my BFF, he probably wouldn’t have murdered me except he was having a really really bad day, plus he didn’t really mean to do it, so let’s just forgive and forget, guys!”

The cruelty of the impression didn’t faze Gansey; he knew what it sounded like when Ronan was lashing out, trying to mask his pain.

“Three _years_ ,” Ronan said, quiet and bitter, “we’ve been in his classes, listening to him talk about declension, and we didn’t have a clue.” He couldn’t stop picturing it. The woods at night, Noah on his knees, pleading. Whelk, in shadow, except for his moving arms. Without meaning to, Ronan slipped, imagined the weapon as a tire iron. 

Ronan let his face rest in his hands, just for a moment. He felt brittle. “I don’t know, Gansey. Sometimes, it feels like the whole fucking world is one big nightmare.”

Gansey didn’t like the sound of that. He didn’t like the knotted tension in Ronan’s shoulders, or the blood that had gotten on his fingers. He didn’t like this whole mess.

“We’re going to stop him,” Gansey’s voice was firm, more confident than he really felt, “And then we’re going to get Noah back to normal.” Ronan glanced at him, then shook his head in incredulity. No doubt he’d stopped thinking about the rottenness of the world and started thinking about what a naïve idiot Gansey was, which was exactly what Gansey had wanted.

The last thing Noah’s father ever said to him was that people who dwelt in the past often missed their opportunity to have a future.

Mr. Czerny was all about seizing opportunity. _Just look at my life_ , he would tell his son, over and over. During that final call, Noah had known he was about to launch into a slew of examples, so he cut him off, lying that he had another call before hanging up. He had memorized all the inspiring anecdotes a long time ago and didn’t need to hear them again.

If he’d known it would be their last phone call, he would have listened for hours.

The upward trajectory of Noah’s family had never really interested him. He’d been faintly embarrassed by it, while he was alive. The Czernys might live in a big house, with bricks and columns and symmetrical lines, but the devil was in the details. They weren’t comfortable in their money yet, hadn’t had it early enough in their lives for it to sink into their speech, their limbs. Not like the Whelks, or the Ganseys. This came out in all sorts of little ways: his mother’s anxious obsession over appearances and small habits, his father’s restlessness and frequent lectures about potential.

(Later, there were times when Adam reminded Noah of his father so much. His father’s accent was a different accent, his father’s fears were different fears, but their agitation was just the same. Ambition? Noah had never been much good at telling the difference between the two. Whatever its name, he saw it in them. Now and then, Adam would get a look in his eyes, and Noah could tell he was staring straight into the future: not with clairvoyance, but hunger. Noah had learned that look on his father’s face, first.

Noah considered telling Adam sometimes, when he would hear Adam’s thoughts, tortuous with self-doubt and discouragement. He still remembered a lot of those inspiring anecdotes. But fathers weren’t a topic to be broached with Adam lightly.)

It was different for Noah and his sisters, who had been born after the move to Henrietta. They had never lived any other way. Maybe that was why whatever fire burned in Mr. Czerny, spurring him to ever greater heights, did not burn in Noah. Since a young age, Noah had been a malleable substance, settling into patterns determined by the people around him. When he was living at home, it was easy enough to mirror his father’s drive, to mimic his fire by reflecting it. Once he started Aglionby, though, things changed, and Noah’s father began to worry. Noah was becoming a man. It was time for him to decide what he wanted to make of himself. He needed to draft a battle strategy for the life ahead. After all, hadn’t that been the reason why Mr. Czerny had worked so hard? To give his children more than he’d had, so they could wade into the war of life with whole armies at their command?

Mr. Czerny spent so much of those last few months conjuring up outlines for his son’s life. Medical school or law school? He preferred medical, but Noah had always been such a tender boy, such a clumsy boy. Would he grow out of it in time to be a surgeon? Or there was business, or fame? While Noah had only had a nebulous, college-shaped idea of his life after graduation, his father had charted out multiple elaborate paths. He imagined careers, accolaides, courtships, weddings, grandsons. When Noah went missing, it seemed impossible to him. Noah’s future was a thing that already existed so many times over in his mind. It was inconceivable that Noah would not be there to live at least one of those lives.

Noah sat cross-legged at the foot of Ronan’s bed, watching him. He didn’t know if he was visible—it was hard to tell sometimes, and harder at night—but it didn’t matter. Ronan was asleep.

Noah wasn’t sure if it was creepy to sit with him like this. He worried that it might be. He was trying to get better at not being creepy. It was never something he’d had a problem with when he was alive, but, like so much else, his ability to tell the difference had slipped away from him.

At least when he did something creepy around Ronan, he got angry or made fun of him for it, as if Noah were a normal person. That felt a lot better than Adam’s fear (he’d already been scared enough in his life), or Blue’s sadness (making her happy was all Noah had ever wanted to do), or Gansey’s guilt (it wasn’t his fault, it had never been his fault). With Ronan, Noah could pretend, now and then, that he wasn’t what he was.

Which was funny, since Ronan brought up the fact that Noah was a ghost so much more often than the others. But the fact that he did made it somehow mundane. Like making fun of Blue for being short, or Gansey for being so obsessed with Glendower.

Ronan was starting to have a nightmare. Noah knew the look of it. Would it be better to wake him up now, or to leave him be? If he left him, Ronan might have time to turn the dream good again, or fight whatever horror he was faced with. But leaving him felt like standing idly by while his own brain tortured him. Noah set a hand on Ronan’s shoulder, shaking very faintly.

“Ronan. _Ronan_.”

It worked. Ronan’s eyes shot open, his breath coming in harsh gasps. He seemed paralyzed at first, but his eyes quickly darted to the shadowed corners of the room, looking for monsters. He looked down at his hands, saw that they were empty. He heaved a sigh of relief, feeling returning to his limbs.

Only then did he notice Noah, who had gone back to sitting at the foot of the bed. He had his arms wrapped around his legs and was watching Ronan over the tops of his knees. Ronan’s lip curled in a snarl, “What’s with the Edward Cullen shit, Noah?”

Noah could tell Ronan wasn’t actually angry. He was clearly relieved to have been awoken before the nightmare could completely engulf him. He ran a hand down his face, untangling himself from the damp sheets.

“Sorry,” Noah said chagrined. He’d been right, it was creepy, “I get bored when everyone is asleep.”

Ronan hauled himself out of the bed and started rummaging around for a fresh shirt. “Yeah, well, read a book.” 

“And I don’t know who Edward Cullen is.”

Ronan looked over his shoulder to check if Noah was kidding him. When Ronan saw that he meant it, he shook his head. “I guess it did come out after you shuffled off this mortal coil. But being dead’s no excuse not to get pop culture references. Bad enough with Gansey around…” Ronan pulled off his tank top, was about to lob it at the hamper when he saw that Noah was still looking at him.

“What, you want a fucking show?” The sudden venom in the words didn’t surprise Noah. He knew Ronan’s secret, the one he still wouldn’t even tell himself. This was one area where it was not a good idea to tease. So Noah covered his eyes with his hands, waiting while Ronan changed.

“At least you didn’t claw the hell out of me this time.”

Guilt surged in Noah. He felt distantly sick. When his hands started to go translucent (it was so hard to stay opaque, when he was upset), he lowered his eyes to the ground. “I’m so sorry.” His voice sounded hollow. Neither of them had dared to talk about this – Noah had thought Ronan might let it slide without ever bringing it up.

“What was that all about, anyway?”

Ronan had a right to ask. Noah had done a lot of uncharacteristic things at that time, but Ronan was the only one that he had hurt.

Noah wanted to tell him, could tell him just enough to make his actions make sense, without telling him _everything_. But the thought of all that explaining was exhausting. If he started it right now, he’d probably disappear out of sheer gloom halfway. Better to not even try.

“I have no idea,” he mumbled, bleak, “I wasn’t in control right then. And now, I don’t remember. At all.”

Silence. Then, “You are a terrible liar, Noah.”

“Yeah.”

“Whatever. Just don’t do it again, or I’ll kick your sorry Casper ass.” The words might have been threatening, but when Ronan peeled Noah’s semi-transparent hands from his face, his touch was very gentle.

“Deal.”

Ronan flung himself onto the bed. “It’s hotter than Satan’s taint in here!” He twisted around in an attempt to find the driest, coolest patch. Gansey had never quite managed to find a way to air condition Monmouth Manufacturing properly, and with the recent power outages, sometimes it went out altogether. Tonight was one of those nights, and the air was a muggy 80 degrees. To Gansey, this flaw made the place charming, the same way all the Pig’s breakdowns were charming. Ronan did not agree.

“Hey,” he said to Noah, “C’mere.”

At once, Noah was standing by the head of the bed, without ever having walked there. Ronan was either too tired or too hot to make fun of him anymore. He reached for Noah’s wrist, pulling him down towards the bed. Confused but obedient, Noah let him do it, laying down, giving Ronan plenty of space. But Ronan clearly didn’t want space. He pressed his chest flush with Noah’s back, draped an arm on the dip of his waist, flung his leg nonchalantly on top of Noah’s.

“There we go,” Ronan sighed, pleased with himself, and Noah understood.

“So I’m your personal A/C now?” Noah joked. He had to joke. If he had been alive, his heart would have been pounding in his chest, his stomach full of butterflies. But he didn’t have a heart or stomach anymore, so instead Ronan’s closeness made him more solid, more here.

“Hell yeah.”

Noah could feel the sweat from Ronan’s skin. To someone else, it might have been unpleasant, but it wasn’t to Noah. For a few minutes, neither of them moved much, except little adjustments to align their bodies more perfectly. Noah didn’t want to say anything that might make Ronan pull away. He understood that this wasn’t just a question of convenience. Ronan had forgiven him, even if he couldn’t bring himself to say something so cheesy. So this was his way of showing it.

Very quietly, Noah said, “I used to run hot.”

“What?” Ronan was half-asleep again. Maybe he shouldn’t have said anything.

“When I was alive. I was always too hot.”

Ronan made a soft _hmm_ sound, pressing his face to the back of Noah’s neck. If he were more awake, if there were anyone else to see him, Ronan would not have dared this. There were some things he was clearly still coming to terms with about himself. But since they were alone, suspended in the dark and the quiet of the very early morning, it was possible to touch like this. Noah pulled Ronan’s arm against his chest, lacing their fingers together. Ronan mostly asleep, sighed in approval.

Noah listened to the rain starting to fall against the windows. At some point, he realized that Ronan was sleeping, his breaths deep and even. Noah wanted to stay like this as long as he could. He waited until he felt Ronan shiver before he got up.

Of course it couldn’t last forever, but for the first time in a long time, Noah had felt warm.


	2. Chapter 2

_Moreover, perhaps it isn’t love when I say you are what I love the most –you are the knife I turn inside myself, this is love._  
\- Franz Kafka, **Letters to Milena**

Every time Noah felt himself disappearing, it was Ronan he clung to.

The first time, he assumed it was just proximity. After all, he’d been standing a foot away from Ronan in the Dollar City when the ley line flickered and failed. The sensation had been like suddenly falling: a moment of surprise followed by a lurch of mindless panic. He’d grabbed out blindly for something, anything, that might break the fall, and Ronan had been the closest steady point. 

But the next time, he wasn’t anywhere near Ronan. It happened while he was wandering around Aglionby. It was summer and the school was mostly empty: perfect for a ghost looking to mope around his old dorm room, slouch through the unlit library and stare at the new computers in the media lab. All the little changes were like pinpricks, sharp, terrible. The world, going on without him. It would always keep going on without him.

He was completely alone and hardly substantial enough to cast a shadow. So, when he felt the sudden airlessness, he thought this was finally it. The ley line was gone for good, and now there would be only nothingness.

Even though it was useless, he still reached out, hands grasping for a lifeline. The next thing Noah knew was warmth, steamy air, and falling water. For a moment he thought it was raining.

It was not raining. He was standing in the shower at Monmouth Manufacturing, hands fixed tightly around the wrist of a very naked Ronan, who had suds in his buzzed hair and a furious look on his face. Still, he let Noah hold onto him, steadying him when he nearly lost his balance. The first absurd thought Noah had was it was a bad idea to stand in the shower fully clothed, with his shoes on. His second thought was that he had never seen so much of Ronan’s tattoo before.

As soon as he could, Noah let go. Ronan inhaled sharply with relief, sagging against the shower wall. The smell of the forest was thick, oppressive. Even though the water coming from the shower head was hot enough to steam the air between them, Ronan was shivering badly.

“I’m so sorry, Ronan, I’m so sorry.”

“Is this just fucking how it’s going to be now? I can’t even take a goddamn shower without you popping in to grope me with your ghosty hands and freeze me half to death like some kind of piece of shit Jack Frost motherfucker, I mean, you could at least have the decency to buy me a nice dinner before you—”

Ronan broke off his tirade when Noah gasped, a tiny terrified sound, and flickered again. He could feel the energy of the ley line, sluggish still, sputtering.

“It’s—”

Noah wanted to say, _It’s happening, Ronan, it’s happening again and I can’t stop it, please help me!_ But he couldn’t breathe to make the words become sound.

Without hesitation, Ronan gripped Noah by the upper arms, his fingers clamping down tightly enough that it would have hurt, if Noah still had a body to hurt. When the ley line disappeared this time, Noah didn’t fall. Ronan was a rope he clung to.

“The fuck d’you think you’re going?” Ronan’s teeth were chattering, but he held on. Noah stared at him, eyes round with fear. Ronan was pale and unsteady, but he was smiling his knife-thin smile. He looked ferocious and beautiful. “I wasn’t done yelling at you yet.”

The ley line wasn’t gone long, this time. Noah held on, held on, and Ronan never took his eyes off him. When he felt the energy return and stabilize, Noah said, “I’m okay now.”

Ronan’s hands felt bloodless, numb. He put them under the hot water and rubbed them together clumsily to try to restore feeling.

“Seriously, next time can you at least try to warn me.”

Ronan sounded pissed, but Noah heard _next time_ and knew that it was grudging permission. He nodded.

“Now get out of here, you filthy perv.”

Noah didn’t know why it was always Ronan. If he’d had to guess before it all started, he would have thought it would be Blue. She was so powerful, and he already drew on her energy in a small way whenever they were together. But still, every time he felt the ley line wavering, Ronan was the one he clung to for dear life, or whatever he had that passed for it.

Maybe, Noah thought, it was because he was so _alive_. Of course, all of Noah’s friends were alive, but what they didn’t seem to know was they were alive in different ways. Blue was alive in a steady, beautiful way that overflowed and made the world around her radiant. Gansey’s aliveness was one side of a coin; Noah knew he was the other side. After what had happened with Cabeswater, Adam’s aliveness daunted Noah, confused him. But Ronan – Ronan was alive in a way that made it seem like insolence aimed at death. Being alive for him was an act of defiance.

It was that kind of alive that Noah reached for: the kind that understood the laws of nature and magic and laughed in their faces, with blood between its teeth.

For the seven years between his death and when Blue and Gansey found his body, Noah had thought that what he wanted the most was for someone to just _listen_ to him, to uncover what had happened to him, to know who and what he was. If just one person could do that, the future wouldn’t be so unbearable.

Instead of one person, he had gotten four. And it was good – better than anything he’d dared to hope for.

But he had learned the hard way that if something looks too good to be true, it just might be. Noah loved his friends; he even loved the broken pieces inside each of them. He wanted to look after them, to help and protect them. But now that he had them, he had something to lose. Noah knew how easily the five of them could fracture apart. These days, with Adam and Gansey and Blue all fighting constantly, and with Ronan throwing himself into danger more and more like he was playing a game of chicken with God, it felt like it was already starting.

“Can I ask you something?”

It was just the two of them, him and Blue, sitting on the rickety bleachers by the park’s small baseball diamond. Noah was in the row behind her; she leaned her back against his shins while he tried, with little success, to braid her hair. A small pile of clips and bobby pins sat in her lap. She played with a barrette idly, clipping and unclipping it onto the nail of her index finger. The sun had slipped behind the Blue Ridge mountains and the sky was just starting to blush pink. Blue liked the summer evening sounds of Henrietta: cicadas, distant cars, even more distant thunder.

Noah wasn’t very good with his hands, and her hair was too short and too uneven for braiding. It might have been possible if he’d been willing to tug a bit, but he was over-careful not to pull on her hair. Still, his cold fingers against her scalp felt nice. They both missed the others, and they were both worried about them, but it was also good, to be quiet and together like this.

“A ghost something, or a normal something?” Noah asked. He didn’t feel like talking about being dead right now. Not when he felt so close to being whole.

“Normal something, I promise,” Blue said.

“Shoot.”

“What’s your thing with hair?” Blue felt his hands go still. “Not that I mind, I was just curious.”

He might have told her he didn’t want to say, and she would let him. He might have told her a feeble lie, and she would pretend to believe him. But because it was Blue, and because she wasn’t looking at him, and because the cicadas were loud, he felt like, for once, he could say it.

“When I was alive. There was, um. Someone.”

“Oh really?” she prompted. He could hear the smile in her voice, good-natured, cajoling. Noah unwove a particularly lopsided braid, starting over in the same spot.

“…A guy.”

“Oh _rreeeaaallyy_?” She sounded pleased as punch. He was hardly an expert on the topic, but Noah thought that, as far as coming out stories went, this one was pretty fucking bizarre. Blue’s delight meant she couldn’t have guessed who Noah was talking about, yet.

“And this guy, he, uh—” Noah’s voice cracked. He cleared his throat, but it was too late. Even if he hadn’t been able to hear the alarmed realization _wait, he sounds sad, this is a bad story flitting_ across Blue’s mind, he would have been able to feel her back tensing up against him. Too late to take it back.

“He really liked it when I played with his hair. He never admitted it, but he always found excuses to make me do it, you know?” There was a little too much of a pleading note in that question. He wanted her to understand; not just this particular detail, but all of it. The whole tangled thing. “So, when I first met you, your hair was so cute and spiky, plus you seemed to enjoy it…”

Noah tailed off, shrugging with his whole body. His shoulders were hunched miserably, and the smudge on his face was pitch black in the rapidly failing light. “I guess I just missed it,” he finished, hollowly.

What he meant, they both knew, was _I guess I just miss **him**._

“Oh, _Noah,_ ” Blue said, and he could tell that she’d figured it out. She knew he was talking about Whelk, and all that it implied, and now her big big heart was breaking all over again. He hadn’t meant for that to happen.

Noah wrapped his arms around his chest, pressed his cheek against his shoulder. He wanted to dissolve. He hated himself for making her sad. Blue turned around and, very gently, cupped his face in her warm hands, even though right then he looked more like a corpse than a boy. 

“I know I shouldn’t,” the tears that spilled onto her fingers were cold, “But I—” Noah couldn’t meet her eyes. He shrugged again, such an eloquent but insufficient gesture. “I guess I don’t know how.”

“There are some things we just can’t help,” Blue said, like she really knew it. Then she hugged him tightly for a long, long time.

This was the worst part, the part Noah didn’t even like admitting to himself. There were days, infrequent but unavoidable, when he hated Whelk so much that he wanted to tear the whole world down. Most of the time, he just tried not to think about him. And some days, despising himself, Noah missed Whelk so much that he would find himself outside the door to his apartment. He wanted to knock, walk in like no time had passed. He wanted to laugh at Whelk’s mean-spirited jokes and listen to him complain about songs on the radio that he hated. He wanted to make fun of Whelk for teaching Latin. He wanted to sit together for an hour without speaking and play with Whelk’s hair.

(A lot of Noah’s blood had gotten into Whelk’s hair, while he was killing him. But Noah still missed him.)

“Quit screwing around and give me the goddamn keys already.”

“Make me.”

Noah held the car keys tightly in his fist, which he waved rudely in front of Whelk’s face. When Whelk lunged for them, he moved his hand out of reach, grinning from ear to ear.

“Too slow!” Noah crowed, delighted. His cheeks were flushed, his eyes bright with amusement. He didn’t care if it was completely immature, it was fun to goad Whelk like this. It was so easy to get him riled up.

“I swear to God, Czerny, we’re going to miss this concert because it is going to take me at least an hour to give you the thorough ass kicking that you deserve.”

“I’d like to see you try, sea snail.”

That was the last straw. Whelk tackled Noah around the middle, sent both of them toppling to the floor. It wasn’t a real fight, of course. Just roughhousing and youthful high spirits. Noah had hit his head on the floor and was wincing and laughing all at once, still darting his hand to and fro as Whelk tried to catch it. Whelk changed tactics, pinning down Noah’s shoulders with one foream, hauling up his Aglionby sweater and pinching his stomach, hard.

“Oww- _wuh_!” Noah made the word have two syllables. Sensing his nearing defeat, he hurled the keys across the floor and far under Whelk’s bed.

“You’re such a fucking child,” Whelk said. Noah giggled. Whelk kissed him, still holding him down; Noah didn’t seem to mind. They didn’t do this here, had never done this in their dorm before. The novelty of it was exhilarating. 

They were supposed to be leaving soon, supposed to be picking up both their girlfriends and taking them to a concert up in D.C. But they had a few minutes to spare, and neither of them saw anything incompatible between what they were doing now and what they were about to be doing in an hour or two. Of course they both had girlfriends; they weren’t dating one another. They were friends. They were inseparable. They were Czerny and Whelk.

Noah wished fewer of his memories involved Whelk looming over him. He wished fewer of his memories involved remembering how much he’d been in love with him.

“Noah? Are you there?”

Noah wasn’t sure if he had been in the room before Adam asked for him, or if Adam’s voice had brought him. It was hard to tell anything for certain with Adam, since he had woken up the ley line. He was so different. Sometimes it was hard for Noah to come close to him. Sometimes when Noah looked at Adam he was blurred at the edges, melting into the space behind him, as if _he_ were the ghost.

But tonight, he was just Adam Parrish, or as close as he had been to just Adam Parrish for a while. Noah could see him even in the darkness, curled into a question mark beneath his blanket. He didn’t look up or move as Noah came closer, so Noah laid down on the bare, splintered floor beside Adam’s mattress, meeting his eyes.

“Yeah.”

Adam didn’t say anything for a long time. The circles under his eyes were as dark as bruises. Noah waited. He could be very patient. He was used to this; now and then, they all told him secrets. Some things could only be said in whispers to a shadow.

“Why’d you cut Ronan?”

It wasn’t what Noah had been expecting. He’d assumed this was about Adam. About his fight with Gansey, or his fight with Blue, or his recent hallucinations. Noah needed a moment to reorient himself.

“What?”

“Right after— after they moved your body. When you were upset.”

“Oh.”

Now it was Noah’s turn not to say anything for a while. He was so uncomfortable with questions about himself. It was still strange, after so many years of drifting—unknown, ignored—to be the focus of attention. The rest of the group expected him to be able to account for himself as a whole, linear being with an uninterrupted identity, but it was a skill he was having to relearn.

“Scratched,” he said finally. He could tell from the look of alarm on Adam’s face that he was beginning to fade, so he tried focusing harder on this place, this time. He didn’t dare try to siphon any energy from Adam, not now that his energy and Cabeswater’s were a messy tangle. “I didn’t cut him, I—” Noah trailed off, making a vague gesture with his hand, raking his nails through the air. The distinction seemed important.

Adam nodded, still waiting for an answer.

 _This is about his dad,_ Noah realized. He should have seen it immediately. Of course, Adam would want to know this. It was honestly sad, when Noah thought about it, because he wasn’t asking ‘why would you ever hurt your friend?’ Adam Parrish didn’t have the luxury of questioning the compatibility of intimacy and violence. Instead, he was asking ‘what specifically did Ronan do wrong that prompted you to hurt him?’ When Noah realized this, he didn’t want to answer at all. He wanted to go to Adam’s parents’ trailer and break things, give _them_ a dose of fear. Be the poltergeist he’d acted like, when he’d scratched Ronan.

He sighed. “I shouldn’t have done it.”

Noah knew that, generally speaking, Adam thought of him as gentle. Harmless. He supposed he was, usually. He didn’t want that idea of him to change. But he was so afraid of the truth; he’d gotten so comfortable avoiding it. Was he really dodging the question because Adam shouldn’t have asked it, or was he doing it for himself?

He thought about his talk on the bleachers with Blue, thought how after it he had felt fractionally less hollow. Noah thought about the way he felt when he looked at his friends and saw the broken places inside them and wished he could knit them back together. Maybe all this time he’d been a hypocrite, wanting to heal them so badly he refused to look down and see his own wounds.

“Sometimes… he reminds me of him.”

When he saw no comprehension on Adam’s face, he swallowed and added, “Whelk.”

Noah could tell from the sound of Adam’s small inhale that that had done the trick. It was horrible to watch him begin to understand. Noah draped an arm across his face, careful to cover the black, hollow space on his cheek. He didn’t want Adam looking at it right now. He gave serious thought to disappearing.

“But Ronan’s nothing like Whelk,” Adam said.

“He is, though. He’s messy and he never goes the hell to sleep.”

“Gansey’s like that, too.”

“I know that.” Noah was making a mess of this, and he knew it. He didn’t know what Adam wanted from him. “He’s good at Latin.”

“What does that matter?” Adam asked. He was right to.

“He’s—” Why was it so hard to explain? Thinking about Whelk, remembering Whelk, made Noah feel sick. He hoped he wouldn’t throw up. “He’s reckless and he doesn’t take anything seriously. You know how he is. He acts like being rude is the same as being funny.” He tried to say it with a scoff, but he wasn’t fooling anyone. Noah loved that about Ronan, and they both knew it.

Miserable, Noah curled into a tight ball, pressing his forehead into his knees. “He makes me laugh. And I… care about him.”

Adam didn’t ask another question, so Noah guessed that he finally understood. Ronan made him laugh, the way Whelk had made him laugh. Unlike the rest of them, Noah loved it when Ronan was abrasive, and thoughtless, and just this side of cruel. He loved it because it reminded him so much of the boy who had killed him, who he had loved. That was why he had scratched Ronan, when they moved his bones. Telling them about his death had meant thinking about it, reliving it in a way that he’d been avoiding for a long time. The betrayal had felt like new, but he wasn’t present enough to remember the difference between Ronan and Whelk, so when he tried to fight back, he hurt the wrong person.

“Jesus Christ,” Adam breathed.

“I know it’s messed up,” Noah said. Then, “I’m messed up.” Then, “ _Please_ don’t tell him.”

“…I won’t.”


	3. Chapter 3

_swollen with words you never said,  
swollen with hoarded love._

_I exist in two places,_  
         here and where you are  
\- Margaret Atwood, Corpse Song)

  
  


Once, Blue asked Noah if he wished he had a ghost friend, like himself. He told her the truth—that he was glad he hadn’t come across anyone like him and he hoped he never would. Stories about ghosts had always creeped him out and becoming one himself had done nothing to change that.

True, it might be nice to have someone who could give him advice, answer questions, teach him ghost tricks, that kind of thing. But for the most part, Noah liked having friends who were alive.

And he wanted them to stay that way. 

“Be _careful_ ,” Noah repeated.

“Sure thing, Mom.” 

Ronan was on the roof of Monmouth, walking along the very edge, his arms outstretched. He smelled like gasoline, alcohol, burned chemicals. There was a lot of dried blood on his knuckles.

Gansey and Ronan had been strange and wild when they’d left for the so-called substance party. While they were gone, Noah had tried to repair some of Gansey’s model of Henrietta, but the damaged places were too badly trampled. The cardboard was split and mangled and could never be returned to its original shape.

Some things it was pointless trying to fix.

Gansey had been more himself when they returned: tired and disappointed that the real world didn’t live up to his ideal. He had showered and gone to bed, clean and calm once more. But Ronan was more keyed up than ever. He couldn’t seem to stand still; Kavinsky’s music was still thudding in the back of his mind; his blood was singing with unspent adrenaline. So he’d gotten drunk and come up here, and now Noah wasn’t sure he wouldn’t throw himself off the roof on a whim, just to see what would happen.

Noah tried not to eavesdrop on his friends’ thoughts, when he could help it. Sometimes he had a hard time telling what they’d said aloud and what they hadn’t, but he didn’t mean to be invasive—most of the time. But at that moment, he didn’t want any surprises. He wanted to know what Ronan was thinking, why he was acting this way.

But the inside of Ronan’s mind was such a confused roar. Noah caught random images—a tire iron with a bloody scrap of scalp stuck to it, a Molotov cocktail inscribing a bright arc against the evening sky, a bead of sweat sliding into the dip between Kavinsky’s ribs, Aurora Lynch’s empty face, streetlamps streaking by at a frightening speed, a delta of veins faintly visible on Gansey’s tan forearm, a wooden crucifix—overlaid with abstract currents of excitement and shame, pride and fear. These impressions gave Noah a general sense of what was going on. The only trouble was, none of it was anything Noah could help with, and he wanted so badly to help. 

There were images running through Noah’s mind, too. He could see it all happening: a sudden drop, Ronan letting out a surprised laugh as he plummeted. His skull, split on the asphalt. A slowly spreading halo of red. Gansey running out in his pajamas, too shocked even to make a sound. It seemed as real to Noah as if it had already happened. Why was he the only one who seemed to realize how fragile a human body was, how easily broken? If Ronan fell, would he be fast enough to catch him? Solid enough to make a difference? 

“Are you trying to win a Darwin award or something? You’re acting like a moron.” Noah said, with his best attempt at belligerence. If he could goad Ronan into fighting with him maybe he would come away from the edge. But he couldn’t fake it—even to his own ears he sounded tremulous and small. He was shaking badly. Ronan wouldn’t listen. No one ever listened.

Ronan looked right at him and, with a malicious little smile, pretended to wobble. Noah took two quick steps forward, ready to catch him, before he realized he wasn’t really falling. Ronan laughed at him like it was the greatest joke on earth. He picked up one foot so he was balancing on a single leg. There weren’t even two inches between his shoe and the edge.

Noah understood, then, that his concern was only making matters worse. Ronan was feeding off his terror, and he would keep doing more and more dangerous things to elicit it.

“You should see your face,” Ronan cackled. He kept acting like this was some game they’d both agreed to.

Noah didn’t know what to do. If he left, deprived Ronan of his audience, maybe he would get bored and come inside. But what if he left and Ronan slipped, and by the time he noticed it was too late? Could he make it in time to wake up Gansey? Ronan always listened to Gansey.

“Ronan, _please_.”

In response, Ronan just switched legs, his face smug and triumphant. “Alright, now tell me something. Were you born a pussy, Czerny, or is it a side effect of getting your ass murdered?”

It was like a switch had been flipped; the anger that Noah had failed to fake moments before came flooding into him, unchecked and very real. A second after the words were out of Ronan’s mouth, he was hurtling through the air: not over the edge of the building, but across the roof, hauled by the front of his shirt. Noah had gone mostly invisible, but that didn’t stop him from throwing Ronan inside and slamming the door to the roof behind him, the deadbolt falling into place with a loud _clang!_ Ronan hit the far wall hard, found himself pinned there. All at once, the air was so cold that his breath billowed and his skin stung.

Only small slivers of Noah were visible in the gloom: the ridge of his knuckles with Ronan’s shirt twisted beneath them. His clenched teeth, more of them showing than there ought to be. His eyes, unblinking, swallowing the light. 

Ronan was momentarily too surprised even for sarcasm. He’d never seen Noah like this. Since his father was killed, Ronan had become an expert at annoying people. He would test them first, looking for their weak points. Then, once he found them, he would poke and poke until they snapped at him. It wasn’t something that he did intentionally, for the most part. He just couldn’t seem to stop himself. But, unlike everyone else, Noah never rose to the bait. He either teased back, which was fun, or he sulked, which was also fun.

He’d made fun of Noah for being a coward dozens of times before. He’d made fun of him being murdered, too, though less often, because it made Gansey gasp, and Blue throw things, and Adam look at him with disgust. But Noah had always put up with it until now. So what was different?

Ronan didn’t have to wonder long.

The anger subsided as quickly as it had come; in its wake, Noah looked even more rumpled and pitiful than usual. Pulling Ronan away from the edge had almost totally drained him. He did not so much let go of the front of Ronan’s shirt as begin to dissolve at the fingertips.

“Can you not call me that?” Noah murmured. His voice was dull, hollow. A dead voice. Ronan shuddered despite himself. “Please? I hate it.”

Noah didn’t stick around long enough for Ronan to reply. His form flickered in the way that Ronan was familiar with, but instead of reaching out for support, he took a step back, let himself go.

Gradually, the heat of the midsummer evening crept back into the air. Ronan stood there, reeling, his eyes closed. The alcohol in his system made it hard to think. He told himself he didn’t feel bad. He hadn’t done anything wrong. If the name thing was such a big deal, Noah could have just fucking said so without all the drama. How was he supposed to know? It wasn’t like he’d been trying to provoke a reaction by using Noah’s last name.

Had he?

It was common at Aglionby, to call other boys by their surnames. But now that Ronan thought about it, he’d never heard Adam or Gansey calling Noah by his, even after they’d learned it. Had Noah asked them not to? Ronan couldn’t remember. He couldn’t remember if he’d known just now that it would hurt Noah. Had he been rubbing salt into a wound on accident, or on purpose? And what did it say about him that he couldn’t tell the difference?

A tiny voice in the back of his mind, that sounded a lot like Declan, chimed in: _Well done, Ronan. That’s a new record. Are you proud that you’re so awful that even **Noah** can’t stand being around you?_

“You should change your name.”

They had been in their booth in the corner of Nino’s for at least three hours. Littered between them was a mostly-empty pitcher of iced tea, a half-eaten pizza, a marked-up map of central Virginia, a laptop, two AP US history textbooks, a detritus of post-its and pens and squeezed-up lemon wedges and straw wrappers and used napkins. The mess felt somehow friendly. Noah was stretched out parallel to the seat, his back against the wall. Under the table, Whelk had taken off his shoes and had his sock feet resting against Noah’s thigh, a warm pressure. The small, hidden intimacy thrilled Noah. 

“What?” He didn’t even look up from his midterm prep notes, even though he could hardly concentrate on them. He was worried that a waitress would come to clean their table and see how they were sitting, and _know_. They weren’t wearing their uniforms, but it wasn’t hard to put it together that they were Aglionby boys. Half-formed and dire _what ifs_ kept suggesting themselves.

He was also worried that if he moved an inch, Whelk would put his feet down. Noah didn’t want that. He was all too aware that he loved Whelk more than Whelk loved him back, and it made him treasure even the smallest displays of affection. 

“Your name. You should get it legally changed when you turn 18. Like, that day.”

Noah finally lifted his head, eyebrows raised. “Sorry, I can’t seem to remember so could you remind me, which one of us is named after a gastropod? Is it me?”

Whelk started throwing the lemon wedges at him. Noah giggled, brought his hands up to block his face. He didn’t care if people stared at them; his heart felt too full to fit in his chest.

“Okay, okay, my name’s stupid. But it doesn’t make me sound like an immigrant. Whelk’s weird, but it’s American weird, you know?” He sipped his iced tea with pointed dignity, as if he hadn’t just been throwing food in public. “I’m just saying, you don’t think about this kind of stuff and you should.”

Whelk was right, there. Noah never put all that much thought into changing how other people saw him. People had been spelling and pronouncing his name wrong all his life, but he’d never given serious thought to doing anything about it. It seemed like such a drastic step. And what would his family say?

“Of course,” Whelk interrupted his thoughts, “ _I’ll_ still call you Czerny. Old habits.”

He curled his toes against Noah’s leg, smile lazy and indulgent. Noah felt his face going hot. He remembered all the times Whelk had said his name in the past—bellowed it from across the quad, whispered it breathlessly against the shell of his ear—and imagined all the times when he would say it in the years to come. At that moment, Nino’s was a bubble of florescent light, suspended in time. Noah felt certain that nothing would ever come between them. Life could throw anything in their path and it wouldn’t touch them. They existed together in the future tense, never to be parted.

For a while, he was sure he would lose Ronan, one way or another. To the road. To Kavinsky. To his dreams. Noah tried to brace himself for it, without success. He couldn’t stand to see Ronan like this: half in love with his own destruction. So it was a relief, when the ley line finally grew too weak, and he sank into the nothingness he had been keeping at bay. The emptiness wasn’t as bad as he’d thought it would be; Cabeswater was there with him, and he passed the time whispering with the trees.

Cabeswater, as it turned out, was very fond of him. To the forest, Noah was an unimaginably young thing – only a baby when he’d died. Whelk had killed him close enough for Cabeswater to feel it.

_You don’t remember, little one, but you called to us, while you died. A creature as small as you! You felt your blood awakening us and begged us not to honor the ritual. You argued to us that since you were the one giving up your life, you should be the one to decide. Then you showed us your memories to prove that the one who killed you was unworthy and asked us so sweetly not to let your death go to waste. So we gave life back to the child, because it suited us, and showed you his face, so you would know him later._

Noah couldn’t remember any of it. He said thank you anyway.

He had no sense of passing time, no idea if he talked with Cabeswater for an hour or a year. The change, when it came, was sudden. All at once, the darkness disappeared, and he was standing in woods, with the sunlight filtering down through the leaves. The ley line felt strong again, more stable than ever under his feet. Around him, the trees tossed their branches, murmuring, laughing, ebullient.

His friends would be here soon.

“ _Ubi est_?” he asked. _Where is he._

The trees led the way to Whelk. His corpse was face-down in the shade of an oak tree, crooked and decomposing. Noah was glad not to see his face. He hadn’t looked at him in seven years, and he did not want to see how time and decay had changed him. 

His friends had left Whelk to rot in the open air, the way that he had left Noah. Turnabout was fair play. Noah had only wanted to see with his own eyes that he was really gone. But now that he was here, he couldn’t leave him like this. He didn’t care if it was justice.

Noah didn’t have a shovel, but the ground all around was littered with stones. One by one, he picked them up and piled them on top of Whelk’s body. He had only set down a dozen or so when he started to cry, and once he started, he couldn’t stop. Noah was not a picturesque crier. His entire face crumpled and he snuffled and hiccupped wetly. It didn’t matter that Whelk didn’t deserve his tears. He had been Noah’s best friend, and now he was gone, forever. They would never mend things between them. Noah would never make him laugh again, never hear his voice again, never get to ask if things could have turned out differently between them. Each stone that he placed in the pile was another _never_.

(Before he covered Whelk’s head, Noah gently gathered a lock of his hair, twisting it into a tight spiral and shoving it deep into his pocket.)

When he was finished, the rocky mound wasn’t much to look at, but at least it was _something_. A species of goodbye.

He wiped his face on his sleeve and went to find his friends.

Noah hadn’t forgotten what happened on the roof, and he was sure Ronan hadn’t, either. He’d had a lot of time to think about how he’d acted and make himself miserable with regret. Anger was so antithetical to him, it left him feeling greasy, nauseous. He knew that the feeling wouldn’t go away until he apologized, and maybe not even then. But he put it off, because he didn’t know where to begin.

One day, Noah came back from visiting Blue to find his room transformed. The previously bare walls were bright with posters of movies and bands that he liked. The old printing press in the corner was bedecked with tiny, twinkling lights. An acoustic guitar in a battered case leaned against it, next to a sturdy music stand and a tall stack of sheet music. Noah thumbed through it, saw dozens of songs that he loved, all his favorites. On the other side of the tiny room, the bed was gone, to make room for a broad desk. On top of it was a journal with a cute, childish design of a ghost on the cover, and a mug full of strange-looking pens. Noah knew that Ronan must have dreamt them up; they were all different, all impossible. One changed Noah’s scrawl into elaborate calligraphy, while another wrote in ink that kept shifting colors indefinitely, and a third hovered a few inches above the desk whenever Noah let go of it.

On the first page of the journal, a post-it note read: _I know you have trouble keeping track._

Ronan had done all this. Ronan, who never been good at saying what he really meant, who preferred to speak with actions. To Noah, it was an eloquent apology. Each component demonstrated how well Ronan knew him, how much thought he was willing to put into making him happy. He must have looked up some of the songs in the sheet music on the facebook page that Noah’s parents kept as a memorial. It was not just a gesture, but one that had taken care, research, preparation. 

Noah looked at all of it, felt his throat closing up with emotion. It was much too much.

He marched straight into Ronan’s room without knocking. Ronan was lounging on his bed, Chainsaw perched on his bent knee, listening to music. She ruffled her feathers in surprise, stretched her wings nervously. Noah paid no attention to her; he unlatched one of the huge industrial windows and turned to face Ronan.

“You can throw me out of it,” he said quickly.

Ronan pulled the earbuds from his ears, his eyebrows raised in question.

“Throw me out of it,” Noah prompted again. He was kept shifting his weight from foot to foot anxiously.

“Uh, why?”

Ronan thought back to the day he’d thrown Noah out the window. It felt _so long ago_ , but it had only been a few weeks. Noah had been shouting protests, but he’d been beaming, laughing, as alive as Ronan had ever seen him. Now, Noah was ordering him to do it again with a look on his face that couldn’t be described as anything but wretched. 

“I owe you one. Hell, I owe you ten. So… so throw me out the window ten times.” Noah couldn’t seem to decide where to put his hands: he shoved them in his pockets, took them out again, wrung them nervously. Ronan just kept looking at him. Finally, the truth came pouring out, “You got me all that stuff and you shouldn’t be the one saying sorry, I should be. I’m the one who fucked up. I’m the one who keeps hurting you.”

Understanding slid into place on Ronan’s face. He nudged Chainsaw off his knee and stood up. Noah tensed, getting ready to be thrown. He didn’t want to fall—in fact, he hated it—but he knew that he deserved it.

Ronan walked past him, closed the window.

“We’re cool, weirdo,” he reassured, patting Noah’s shoulder in a way that was half irony, half comfort. “You don’t owe me any penance. Plus, you _asking_ me to throw you out the window kinda sucks all the joy out of doing it.” 

Ronan flopped back onto his bed, as if that settled the matter for good. Noah remained hunched in place. Chainsaw flew up onto his shoulder and began rearranging tufts of his hair with her beak, busy and tender. 

After a pause, he said, “Thanks. For the stuff.”

Ronan shrugged uncomfortably. He hated gratitude. “I still can’t believe you voluntarily subjected yourself to Brand New.” Ronan put on a grimace, mimed strumming a guitar while he sang in a comically whiny voice, “If it makes you less saaaad, I will die by your haaaand, blah-blah blah blah-blah blaaaah, this emo music’s so shiiiiit.”

This, at last, coaxed a smile onto Noah’s glum face. “You’re just jealous I got to see their concert.”

Ronan shot him a pained, pitying look. “I’m really _really_ not, though.” Chainsaw, still sifting through Noah’s hair, squawked her emphatic agreement. Ronan and Noah both laughed, and just like that, the awkwardness between them was gone.

“I did actually use that bed every now and then, you know. What if I want to lie down?”

“Climb in with Gansey.” Ronan looked away and added, with that extra layer of fake nonchalance that always gave him away, “Or with me.”

When Blue and Adam showed up at Monmouth, Gansey was waiting for them just inside the door. He hurried them inside, holding a finger to his lips in warning.

“Come look!” he whispered, face alight with suppressed laughter.

He took each of them by the hand and pulled them towards Ronan’s room. Adam and Blue exchanged a look. Ronan was usually still asleep at this hour, and Gansey’s delight didn’t seem right for another crisis or nightmare monster.

Gansey pushed the door open a foot and pointed inside with wordless glee.

At first, Blue thought Gansey was just pointing out Chainsaw, who was admittedly very cute when she slept. Right now she was perched on Ronan’s bedside table, feathers fluffed, looking round and soft. But when Blue heard Adam’s small gasp, she noticed what Gansey had really wanted them to see.

Ronan and Noah were curled together on Ronan’s bed, asleep. With just this side of his face showing, Noah looked almost alive. There was a blanket sandwiched between them, to insulate Ronan against Noah’s temperature. Their bodies were pressed close, legs tangled together. One of Noah’s hands was resting low on Ronan’s stomach. 

“I thought he said he never slept,” Adam whispered, unguarded enough that his Henrietta accent slipped through in the words.

“He doesn’t!” Gansey agreed. All the same, there he was, clearly fast asleep.

“And I thought that, conventionally speaking, the taller person was supposed to be the big spoon.”

Blue’s dry delivery was perfect; Gansey and Adam broke, erupting into fits of loud, snorting laughter that startled the sleepers awake. Chainsaw squawked irritably and Ronan sat bolt upright. When he saw them, he looked ready to commit murder. A few faint creases had transferred to his cheek from the pillow.

“Fucking— have you got nothing better— get the fuck out of—” Words failing him, he picked up a pillow and hurled it at them. Gansey closed the door quickly in defense.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Blue yelled, which set the other two off laughing again.

“We could put itching powder in Gansey’s underwear,” Noah suggested, sleepily.

“Yes,” Ronan said, lying back down and draping an arm over his eyes. From so close, Noah could see that his ears had gone a shade redder with embarrassment, “Let’s.”

The first entry in Noah’s journal said only: _being loved is almost as good as being alive._


	4. Chapter 4

_When night comes, something speaks_  
_from that soft, fragrant wilderness_  
_it says,_ the heart is not a door. But it opens.  
    _We feel in the dark for the hinge._  
\- Carole Glasser Langille, **Five Doors**

Noah hadn’t realized just how much he’d missed sleeping. After that first night with Ronan, he felt better than he had in years. He might not have a living body that needed to regenerate itself, but he had a consciousness, a mind full of thoughts and emotions and sensations and memories that needed cataloguing. Of course, there had been many breaks in his awareness, in the last seven years, when he was too weak to manifest or interact with the world, but that was suspension, not rest.

He hoped it wasn’t a fluke. The next night, he curled up on the couch and tried to sleep on his own, but he could not. Nor the next night, nor the one after. He wanted to try sharing Ronan’s bed again. Ronan had invited him, after all. But that was before Gansey and Blue and Adam had barged in and laughed at them; Ronan might have changed his mind.

The next night, at around 3 AM, Ronan poked his head in Noah’s room. Noah was sitting cross-legged on the floor, trying to teach himself the chords to _Transatlanticism_. When Ronan cleared his throat, he stopped.

“If I have to listen to Gansey muttering to himself about spelunking for one more minute I will lose my fucking mind, so I’m gonna pass out,” Ronan announced, as if telling Noah when he was going to bed were a regular thing.

Noah looked up at Ronan, hope bubbling in his chest. But was he reading too much into it? Ronan probably just wanted him to stop making so much noise. “Got it,” Noah said, putting the guitar back in its case. 

Ostentatiously casual, Ronan added, “So, you coming or what?”

Noah couldn’t help it; he leapt to his feet in excitement, beaming. “Really?!”

There was a knot in Ronan’s stomach – embarrassment, irritation, and joy all lumped together. Noah had absolutely no poker face; he was bouncy with happiness like a puppy that had just learned to recognize the word ‘walk’. It made Ronan’s chest ache. It made him want to punch a hole clear through the wall.

Instead, he rolled his eyes, said, “You’re _such_ a loser.” Noah’s face didn’t fall, not one bit. The knot in Ronan’s stomach tightened. “Yeah, really.” He couldn’t bear to look at Noah, so he quickly went into the next room, knowing Noah would follow.

Noah got Chainsaw ready for bed while Ronan changed, setting her down on her favorite swing and draping the usual bedsheet over her cage. She rustled her feathers, let out a sleepy, appreciative croak. Even though it was summer, Ronan had gotten out a hoodie, his Aglionby PE sweatpants, thick socks and gloves.

As they climbed into the bed, Noah allowed himself a moment of anxiety. What if it didn’t work, this time?

It was hard to worry, though, lying next to Ronan. From this close, his friend’s slow breaths could practically be his own – or the steady beat of his pulse be blood in Noah’s own, long-gone veins.

Noah slept.

“Do you remember anything different happening right before you dropped off?” Gansey asked. In true Gansey fashion, he couldn’t let sleeping mysteries lie. Even though neither Noah nor Ronan particularly cared why Noah was capable of sleeping now, Gansey cared immensely. Ronan and Noah knew from years of friendship that it was pointless to oppose Gansey’s enthusiasm. Besides (even though Ronan, at least, would never admit it) there was nothing in the world quite like being the focus of Gansey’s interest and admiration.

Noah shook his head. Gansey made a small mark on the clipboard in front of him.

“Are you _taking notes_?” Ronan asked, trying hard to make it so that the love in his voice sounded like scorn. A small snort of amusement came from the floor, where Blue was painting details onto Gansey’s model of Henrietta. Ronan looked over to where Adam was sitting, hoping the remark would have at least gotten a smile out of him. Adam, busy drafting a study schedule for the next few months, didn’t look like he’d been listening to a word that was said. Ronan’s shoulders slumped slightly with disappointment

“Have you tried sleeping on your own since the first time it happened?” Gansey asked with pointed dignity, as if Ronan had not spoken at all.

Noah nodded. “Didn’t work.”

“It’s probably just a Greywarren thing,” Blue guessed, adding another window to the façade of the courthouse. Noah couldn’t help noticing that, when she was concentrating on getting the lines just right, she scrunched her nose adorably. He wanted to take a picture of it, but he didn’t think she’d really like that.

“Hmmm,” Gansey mused, tapping his mouth with his pencil. “Maybe.”

“I’m just too powerful for my own good,” Ronan said, smugly.

“You’re too something, that’s for sure,” muttered Adam, surprising Ronan. So he was listening. Adam had bent over, was searching for something in his old backpack. A moment later he sat up, a public library copy of _Henry IV, part 1_ in his hands. Between his jobs, doing all his own cooking and cleaning and laundry, and playing errand boy for Cabeswater, he didn’t really have the time to just lounge around Monmouth with the rest of them if he wasn’t at least pretending to study for his AP exams. Even if they were months away.

“We read that my senior year,” Noah said, voice dreamy and distracted. It struck him as the kind of detail that would have been faint or absent, before Adam and Persephone had begun strengthening the ley line, before Ronan had helped him to sleep. It was such a small memory, but to Noah, it felt like it might be the beginning of something. As if the tiny pieces of himself that had been fading and scattering all these years had halted their movement and were beginning—slowly, so slowly—to return.

“Hasn’t it got a Welsh king in it?” He reached for the memory, brushed the dust off it tentatively, “I remember because none of us spelled his name right on the midterm…” but that was as far as he got before Gansey cut him off. The words ‘Welsh King’ had gotten his attention.

“Glendower!” he exclaimed. Which was not all that unusual, for him. “Glendower is a character in the Henriad! Or at least, Shakespeare’s version of him, which, of course, it’s hardly the most accurate rendering, historically speaking—”

“Of course,” Ronan echoed, sarcastically.

Gansey ignored him, “—but he included a speech in Act III where Glendower talks about the signs around his birth.” And then, in a move that would stretch credulity from anyone but Gansey, he began to recite from memory, “He starts, ‘I say the earth did shake when I was born—’”

“Wow, Gansey, spoilers. Adam’s only just starting it!” Blue said. Adam and Noah both laughed. Ronan did not laugh; the words had sent a quick shiver down his spine. In all these years of looking for Glendower with Gansey, listening to him cite source after source about the mythology, it had never quite occurred to him how much those omens sounded like the tall tales Niall used to tell about the day he was born. _God broke the mold so hard the ground shook._

“Adam, I’ve actually got scans of the Dering Manuscript version on my iPad if you want to have a look, they’re fascinating.”

Adam and Blue shot one another a quick look that wasn’t hard to interpret. They were silently commiserating over what an insufferable rich boy Gansey was.

Gansey knew it, too. “I saved them from the library’s website, where they’re online, _for free_ ,” he said, defensively emphasizing the final two words. 

“Free if you have an iPad,” Blue said, at the same time as Adam said, “But I bet you went to see it in person.”

“It’s in D.C., it’s not like I flew halfway around the world.”

Gansey was only digging himself into a deeper hole, and Noah didn’t want this to escalate into an actual fight, so he interrupted, voice louder than was usual for him:

“I think that if I want to be sure whether or not it’s just a Greywarren thing, I should probably try sleeping with one of you who isn’t Ronan.”

He’d been so concentrated on stopping the flow of their conversation that he hadn’t paused to consider his own wording. “Next to,” he added, quietly, much too late. “Sleeping next to— come on, you guys _know what I meant!_ ” His voice was barely audible over the crescendo of his friends’ laughter. Noah buried his face in his hands, and the gesture only made them all laugh even harder. At least he’d stopped the brewing argument; if that came at the price of his dignity, then so be it. 

“Noah, I never knew you were so forward,” Adam said, the Henrietta accent sneaking out in his distraction.

“Well _I_ knew,” Blue added, but quietly enough that only Noah could hear her. He wanted to disappear, but not in the ghostly, miserable way he was used to. It was the flush-faced, awkward, teenage way that he had just about forgotten.

“Alright, who’s going to volunteer as tribute?” Ronan asked, grin sharp enough to cut. 

“It should probably be me,” Gansey said, at once, “Since I’m the most convenient.”

“I don’t know,” Blue interrupted. Blue was always beautiful, but when she laughed, she was radiant, “I’m the table at Starbucks everyone wants, remember. He’s got a better shot at falling asleep with me than he has with you. Quality beats convenience.”

“Come on, don’t be rude. I’m sure there’s plenty of Noah to go around,” Adam chimed in. Just when Noah thought it couldn’t get any worse. Beside him, Ronan was shaking with silent laughter. “Anyway, if it comes down to powers, I have Cabeswater. That’s got to count for something.”

Ronan laid a hand on Noah’s shoulder, fake-consoling. He was having a hard time getting the words out through his laughter, “I guess you’re just gonna have to sleep with all three of them. For scientific purposes.”

“Just so you know, I hate you all,” Noah said, voice muffled by his hands. The happiness in his chest was like a physical thing, a balloon of joy and gratitude and love that just kept expanding.

In the end, they agreed that Blue should get the first try. Since Noah couldn’t go inside 300 Fox Way, Gansey gallantly offered them his bed for the experiment.

“I promised my parents I’d come up for the weekend, so it works out perfectly,” he explained, “Plus, it’s very comfortable, trust me.” Noah and Blue studiously avoided one another’s gaze. Neither of them had told Gansey that they’d spent a very comfortable half hour kissing on his bed the last time he was in DC, and neither of them intended to do so now.

“We can make a whole sleepover out of it,” Ronan mocked, “Adam can stay over too and we’ll all paint each other’s nails and play MASH and talk about boys.”

“Adam _cannot_ stay over too,” Adam said, absently, “I have work at 6 AM the next day.”

“Nice try, though,” Blue muttered under her breath. Noah bit back a giggle, and Ronan glared daggers at her.

“I was being sarcastic. _Sarcastic._ Maybe you’ve heard of it.” As usual, Ronan was giving himself away by protesting too much, “Besides, I already promised I’d take Matthew to the beach, so I won’t even be here.”

So, the next evening, when Blue biked over to Monmouth after her shift at Nino’s, Noah was the only one there to greet her. Her feet were sore and her temper was sour; the restaurant had been chaotic, packed with a bus-full of civil war tourists stopping in Henrietta for a meal and local color. They had been loud and impatient and had tipped badly, so that by the time she got there, Blue was glad the rest of them were gone.

All of them except Noah, so quiet and undemanding. She didn’t even need to say a word to him. He opened the door for her and said, “I know just the thing.” Noah might never have been in her house, but she’d told him how crowded and busy it always was. So he drew her a hot bath, that she could soak in for hours if she wanted, without Orla pounding on the door for her to hurry the hell up, or Calla coming in without knocking to get something from the medicine cabinet. He made himself a blindfold out of a bandana and sat on the floor beside the clawfoot tub, listening when she felt like talking, sharing the silence when she didn’t, happy just to be in her presence.

After she was done with the bath, Blue borrowed a pair of Gansey’s pajama pants and one of Ronan’s disreputable hoodies, and the two of them went out into the weedy lot to catch fireflies. Noah was terrible at it, but Blue was very good, so that by the time the sun had fully set, the jar was bright with a dozen of them.

Blue put the jar on top of a stack of books, where she could see it from the bed. They got into the bed together, close enough that their noses almost touched. Blue hadn’t planned on any of this, but to tell the truth, she had needed it.

“Thank you,” she said.

“I’d do anything for you,” Noah said, which she already knew.

“Do you think we could— do you mind kissing me, for a little while?”

Noah smiled softly. “No,” he murmured, “I don’t mind.”

So they kissed until Blue pulled away, finally too sleepy to keep her eyes open. Noah didn’t fall asleep, but he didn’t mind. He couldn’t think of any place he’d rather be than here, watching the lazy, warm flashes of the fireflies, listening to Blue gently snore, feeling as close to safe and sound as a ghost could get.

Noah wished he had asked Whelk _why_. He understood Whelk’s upheaval after he’d lost everything, and he understood that Whelk had killed him in order to wake the ley line. It was a logical enough thing to figure out– but Whelk had never been the most logical person, and all of that didn’t explain _why him_. What had he ever done wrong, to make Whelk hate him so much? Or had he never even seen Noah as a person to begin with?

He had tried to ask why, while he was being murdered. But it had been too hard to form words with his face caved in, his mouth full of blood and bits of broken teeth.

The next thing he knew, Adam was saying, “How often do you do that?”

Noah took a moment to orient himself. Sometime near dawn, lying next to Blue, he must have lost track of himself and disappeared for a while. It was disappointing. He had been in the middle of an unprecedented streak—three whole days without any lost time—but he supposed it was inevitable. He shouldn’t hope for too much. Now Noah didn’t know if he’d been absent for a few hours, or a few days. He would have to ask Ronan, before the next time he wrote in his journal.

He felt bad, though, that he’d left Blue to wake up alone.

And he’d returned to awareness in Adam’s apartment above St. Agnes, which made a kind of sense. Adam had been the next one on the list, after Blue. What didn’t make sense was the way Adam was staring at him from the far end of the small room, freckles standing out against an unusual pallor, his knees drawn tightly up to his chest.

“Do what?” Noah asked.

“Act it out like that. Blue told me you did, but I didn’t realize it would be so…” Adam trailed off, words failing him.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Noah didn’t understand, but he could tell that his appearance had terrified Adam. This was something the two of them had in common: the way that, at any moment, fear might come and have dominion over them. Noah sat down so he wasn’t looming, but he didn’t come any closer. He would let Adam approach him when he was ready, like an unfamiliar animal.

Adam’s fear was already softening by small degrees into curiosity. “You don’t remember what you were doing thirty seconds ago?”

Noah shrugged, shoulders hunched defensively. He accepted the lost time and unpredictable lapses because he had no other choice, but he didn’t like thinking about them.

“I wasn’t doing anything, I only just got here.” 

“No, you’ve been here for the last ten minutes, acting out your own death.”

Noah felt a tightness where his throat used to be, swallowed. “No I wasn’t.” His voice was small, childlike even. If it were Blue, she would have dropped it, let him have his denial. But Adam was stubborn, and he knew that a truth which hurt could be better for you in the long run.

“Yes, you were. You appeared, and then you went through the whole thing, from start to finish. I tried to snap you out of it, but I guess you couldn’t hear me.”

Adam wasn’t lying; Noah saw that in the set of his jaw, the directness of his eyes. Unconsciously, Noah brought a hand up, rubbing his palm against his ruined cheek. It was a lot to get his mind around.

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t remember doing it. But I guess I must have.” A new realization settled itself amid the horror in his mind, and Noah asked, wretched, “You- you _watched_?”

Adam had the decency to look guilty, “Yeah, I did.” He thought he knew what Noah was feeling: exposed, as if to a voyeur. It made immediate sense to Adam, that being hurt was a desperately private experience. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have.”

Noah was translucent by now, more of an after-image than a boy. Adam had seen him die. He’d said that Blue had seen it, too. Now Noah couldn’t stop imagining what his murder must have looked like from the outside. He knew it was no one’s fault, but he felt as if Adam had cut him open, reached inside him, and pulled out some dark, hidden organ that was never meant to be handled. 

Adam didn’t know what consolation he could offer. He thought of his father, somewhere out there, probably not all that many miles away. What was he doing, right at this moment? He said, “At least he’s gone for good.”

After a pause, Noah nodded. Adam was surprised he had not vanished, but Noah stuck it out. Those gaps in awareness looked a lot more frightening to him, now that he knew he spent some of them getting murdered over and over, for anyone to see.

“I never thanked you.” Noah picked at a splinter in the wood floor. “For stopping him from hurting anyone else. For…” Noah trailed off, but they both knew the end of that sentence. _For letting him die. For justice._

Adam didn’t know what to say to that. _You’re welcome_ didn’t seem right, so he just nodded.

“Here,” he said, patting the spot right beside him, sure that Noah was just as desperate for a change of subject as he was. He picked up _Henry IV_ , which he’d been reading before Noah showed up. “Come read this with me. I don’t get what Hotspur’s deal is.”

Noah came over, sitting close enough that their knees touched. “He’s the really angry one, right?”

“Yeah. I don’t get what’s up with him and his wife.” Adam was actually pretty sure he understood just fine, but he wanted to give Noah a distraction, and he knew how much Noah liked to be helpful. It was working, too. Noah already looked more solid.

“Oh, I remember that. She’s mad because he hasn’t had sex with her in forever.”

“How come?”

Noah glanced at him sidelong, the tiniest beginnings of a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. He was pretty sure Adam was playing dumb, but he was willing to go along.

“Because he’s only got a boner for war.”

“Great, I’ll be sure to put it just like that on the exam.”

“You should.”

An hour or so later Adam set his alarm for three hours later and crawled into bed, too tired to change out of his clothes or brush his teeth. Noah wanted to tell him that living didn’t have to be such a struggle. He wanted to do Adam’s homework for him, to rob a bank for him, to kill his father for him. But Adam wouldn’t want any of that, and Noah knew better than to even offer.

Instead, he moved a stray strand of hair from Adam’s face, murmured into his good ear, “You smell like Cabeswater.”

Noah was sure by now that Ronan was the only one who could lull him to sleep, but he didn’t want Gansey to feel left out. For a while, Noah was worried that neither of them would get any rest. Gansey was just as much of an insomniac as Ronan and, Noah discovered, far more self-conscious about his personal space. Even before they got into the bed, he turned polite and distant, gave him the full-on Richard Campbell Gansey III routine. Which, Noah knew, meant he was feeling unsafe, in one way or another. Noah hoped that he would settle down on his own, but Gansey just kept tossing and turning, perched on the very edge of the mattress, apologizing any time he so much as brushed Noah with a toe.

“This isn’t a lot different from sleeping on my own,” Noah pointed out dryly, propping himself up on one elbow, “We’re definitely never going to replicate what happened with Ronan if we keep leaving this much room for Jesus.”

The joke would have eased the tension, if he’d told it to Ronan, but Gansey didn’t even crack a smile. Noah felt guilty. More quietly, he added, “If it creeps you out, we don’t have to.”

“It’s not like that,” Gansey said immediately, “I’m just…” his words trailed off, but Noah understood. He didn’t object to sleeping close to Noah, but he didn’t know how to initiate that closeness.

So Noah did it for him, pulling Gansey to the center of the bed and settling their bodies together. That would have been enough, for the parameters of their experiment. But Noah could tell that Gansey liked being touched, wanted it without knowing how to ask for it. He was so invested in the idea of himself as a noble, perfect leader, he sometimes forgot to let himself be a person.

So he ran a hand through Gansey’s hair, felt the tension gradually draining from his limbs. 

“Your hands are so cold,” Gansey murmured, “I have no idea how we were convinced that was normal.”

“It’s not like I was hiding anything.”

“I know.” A small furrow formed between Gansey’s eyebrows, “You told us the truth, but we didn’t listen. I’m sorry. We should have believed you.”

Noah knew why this one detail still bothered Gansey, long after the others had moved on. Of all of his friends, Gansey’s thoughts were the loudest and the clearest to him. They had been connected a long time, Noah and Gansey.

“It wasn’t like when no one would believe you about being stung,” he reassured. Gansey had been shaped in more ways than he knew by those early years of trying to get someone to believe him when he told them what had happened to him. He had had to go through the aftermath alone, dismissed, sent to specialists. None of them had been able to convince him to give up his version of reality for theirs, but the fight had left him with a horror of doing the same to someone else.

“You weren’t just being dicks about it. I would disappear and reappear right in front of you and you wouldn’t notice. Something was _keeping_ you from seeing, until the right moment.”

“I guess so,” Gansey said.

But his mind was still cloudy with guilt and memory, so Noah offered, “Do you want me to tell you a story?” He knew about Gansey’s late-night calls to Blue, how much it soothed him to just listen.

A long pause, then Gansey whispered, “Yes.”

So Noah started to talk. He told Gansey the first story that came into his head – a folktale about a magic firebird and a talking vixen. His mother had read it to him all the time when he was young, and more recently, his sisters had asked him read to them over and over at bedtime. Noah told it well, turning the repetitive fairy tale patterns hypnotic, and he wasn’t even halfway through by the time Gansey fell asleep.

Noah tried to join him, but in the place of that rest came thoughts of his family. He tried to push them away; Noah thought about them as little as possible, by necessity. But he couldn’t help it. It had been a mistake, choosing that story. His sister’s faces seemed to be burned on the inside of his eyelids. He tried to remember how old they were, now. What would he do, when they were the same age as him? Older? Did they still remember how he used to tell them stories? How long would it be until they forgot?

He watched the easy rise and fall of Gansey’s chest, thought of how resentful Gansey got any time he had to spend time with Helen or his parents. He didn’t know. He didn’t have any idea how lucky he was. Envy and bitterness snuck into Noah bit by bit from the dark corners of his mind, until he was seething.

Gansey awoke with a start to the sound of shattering ceramic. One of his many mint plants had flown at great speed from its perch. Another one followed it, scattering an arc of dark soil on the floor.

“Noah?” Gansey called, fumbling for his glasses. There was no sign of Noah, except for the wreckage.


	5. Chapter 5

_Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born._  
\- Anaïs Nin, **Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1**

When he didn’t see Noah at all the next day, Gansey felt a seed of worry bury itself in his gut. But the others didn’t seem to think much of it.

“See, this is why I told you to get him one of those tracker chips, so you wouldn’t freak out any time he went out of your line of sight,” Ronan joked. He was more smug than usual, now that he knew he was the only one Noah could fall asleep next to. Ronan never would have admitted it out loud, but a small part of him had been worried that if he could sleep beside someone else, Noah would abandon him entirely. After all, who would choose him over Gansey, or Adam, or even Blue? “Seriously, relax. He probably got bored of listening to you snore.” 

When Gansey mentioned it to Blue, she asked, “Hasn’t it only been a few hours?” She didn’t get why Gansey would be concerned, assumed he was trying to fix something that wasn’t broken, out of frustration over how their quest for Glendower was stalled. “Noah comes and goes, it’s nothing new. Now, let’s focus…”

Adam was the worst of the bunch. Gansey called him on his cell—a cheap, ugly model with prepaid minutes that he had gotten because it cost less than keeping a landline—while he was out tending to the ley line. He was barely finished telling his story about Noah disappearing when he heard the sound of rushing water from the other end, asked, “Where _are_ you anyway?”

“Gansey,” Adam said, pinching the bridge of his nose. Cabeswater didn’t understand what the holdup was, kept whispering directions at him as if he were lost, “Your need to keep tabs on everyone at every moment of the day is not your most endearing trait.” He hung up and got back to work.

So Gansey had given up, swept the dirt from the floor, and gone about his day. But when evening of the next day rolled around with no sign of Noah, the worry sprouted, sending its tendrils out along his nerves.

Gansey was used to fretting over Adam, and Ronan, and Blue. But most of the time, he didn’t worry about Noah: not because he thought less of him, but because he was already dead. Certain sources of worry—grades, money, health—just didn’t apply. Besides, Noah didn’t go out getting himself into trouble the same way the other three did. 

But now he was worried about Noah, and the feeling was raw and unwieldy. He kept imagining that he saw something moving in the shadows, out of the corner of his eye. He lost count of the number of times he whirled around, hoping Noah was there. But he never was.

None of them, apart from Blue, remembered how they had first met Noah. But Noah remembered.

Gansey had been first. Noah didn’t know the precise date, but he knew it was during the school year, because it had been at Aglionby. Noah was lingering in a hallway of teacher’s offices; the nearest door read ‘BARRINGTON WHELK’. It was one of those days of missing him so terribly that Noah wanted to forgive him for everything and barge in, just to see him again.

Noah wasn’t sure whether or not he would have given in to the temptation. Before he had a chance, he caught a snippet of Gansey’s conversation as he walked by, just the words “—a ley line running through Henrietta—”.

He’d never heard anyone but Whelk talking about ley lines before. Noah turned from the office door and followed Gansey. After the boy Gansey was talking to left, Noah kept following him. When Gansey got into his car, Noah materialized in the front seat. He did this, sometimes: picked someone and followed them around for a while, just for something to do.

“How do you feel about gelato?” Gansey asked.

Noah didn’t respond. The idea that Gansey was talking to him, was aware of him, was so impossible that it didn’t even cross his mind.

“If there’s somewhere else you’d rather go, I’m open to suggestions.”

With a jolt, Noah realized that Gansey was looking at him. Not near him, not past him, not through him, but _at_ him. There was no one in the back seat, or outside the car, and Gansey wasn’t talking on his phone. Which meant those questions had been meant for _him_.

“You’re… talking to me?” Noah whispered. His voice was small, cracked. He was so out of practice at using it.

Gansey smiled easily, turning in the driver’s seat to face him. For some reason, he looked so familiar to Noah. He was sure he had never met this boy before, but he knew him, somehow. “Yeah, of course I’m talking to you. Who else?”

Six years was a long time to go without any sort of interaction with another person, even if a lot of those years were a hazy blur of nonexistence. Noah felt overwhelmed, exposed. He’d gotten so comfortable in his invisibility that being seen felt like a huge invasion of privacy. It made his skin crawl, but it was electrifying.

“Um. Gelato’s good,” Noah said, shakily.

“Gelato it is, my friend,” Gansey replied, turning the key in the engine.

And just like that, they were friends. Gansey talked to Noah as he drove: about his car, about the crew team, about the best gelato he had ever had in his life (in Florence, of course). Noah understood fairly quickly that this boy didn’t realize they had never met before.

“I’m Noah.” His voice was too soft to be heard over the growl of the Pig’s engine. After so many years, unseen and unheard, it was taking all Noah’s bravery to keep this up. He swallowed and tried again, louder. “I’m Noah.”

Gansey shot him a perplexed look. Noah didn’t know if it was the expression, or the way the sun lit the contours of his face, or the wind coming in the car windows and playing in his hair, but it was the first time that he noticed that Gansey was very, very handsome.

“Yeah, I know,” Gansey said, as if this were not new information.

“I don’t know your name,” Noah pointed out.

“Have I really never told you?” Noah wondered vaguely what magic it was, making Gansey think that they had a past together, “Richard Campbell Gansey III. But please, just Gansey.”

Noah turned his face to the window and pressed his forehead to it gently. “What is it with me and guys with stupid rich kid names?” he muttered, very quietly.

“What?” Gansey asked. 

“Nothing,” Noah said.

The gelato place that Gansey took him to hadn’t existed when Noah was alive. It was new, but the kind of new that is carefully designed to look charmingly vintage. Since he had died, Noah had mostly stayed in the places where he spent time while he was alive. But now he was here, in a new place, with a new friend, having new conversations. Like a real person would.

It wasn’t perfect, of course. Before long, Noah realized that there were some things that Gansey could not hear. His first clue came when Gansey told him to “Dig in,” while gesturing with a tiny plastic spoon at the cups of gelato on the table.

“I can’t eat,” Noah said.

“How come?”

He didn’t see any point in lying. “I’m dead.”

Gansey had laughed, like it was a joke. “Alright, more for me, then.”

If it had only been that, Noah would have assumed that Gansey just had a strange sense of humor. But, a few minutes later, Gansey had asked, “So what’s your class schedule this year?”

“I’m not in any classes.” Gansey just kept eating the gelato, with no signs of surprise. Noah tried again, “Because I’m a ghost. I haven’t been in school for years, since I was killed.” It felt strange, saying the words aloud, to someone who could hear them.

Only he couldn’t. Gansey’s eyes were glazed as he nodded and said, blandly, “That sounds like a doozy. You’re sure going to be busy when it’s time for finals.”

Noah let the matter drop. There was so much he didn’t understand about his existence that he had learned not to question too much. Instead, he said: “I heard you talking about ley lines earlier.”

Gansey’s face transformed, as if a light had been switched on inside him. “You know about ley lines?” The excitement made him radiant, and Noah scooted closer, quietly feeding off it. 

He didn’t really want to talk about ley lines—it reminded him too much of Whelk—but Gansey’s enthusiasm was thrilling. So he lied, “Only a little. I’d like to know more.”

Which was all the encouragement Gansey needed. He went on and on, switching from the ley lines, to Glendower, to his quest, talking continuously as the remains of the gelato melted between them. After almost two hours, Gansey checked his watch. 

“I’m sorry, I must be keeping you from something,” Gansey apologized. The change was extraordinary; all at once, that light was shuttered behind a false smile and formality. From the shape of Gansey’s thoughts, Noah could infer years of being dismissed with a mix of condescension and indulgence. Strange obsessions were not quite compatible with polite society.

“You’re not.” It didn’t seem worth it to Noah to try to explain just how little Gansey was keeping him from. Instead, because it was true, he said, “I could probably listen to you until the end of time and not get sick of it.”

The polite mask fell away again, and Gansey beamed.

On the third day Noah was missing, Blue asked Gansey if he had said something to upset him.

“No.”

“Are you sure?” Adam asked.

“Tact isn’t your strong suit,” Ronan added.

“If that isn’t the pot calling out the kettle then I don’t know what is,” Blue sniped. Gansey felt a tiny rush of warmth that she would come to his defense, but it was quickly extinguished by guilt and doubt. Gansey knew himself. He knew how easily he put his foot in his mouth without realizing it. But he had sifted through the memory again and again, put himself on trial in his own mind. He couldn’t find any evidence that he had said something to hurt Noah.

“I don’t think so. He didn’t act upset. He was…” Gansey thought of how attentive Noah had been with him, of his cold touch and his gentle voice, lulling him to a much easier sleep than he usually found. He didn’t know how to articulate that feeling of being cared for. “He was nice.” The words were so far from sufficient than Gansey wanted to laugh.

“I’m sure he’ll turn up,” Blue said, her voice softer now that she had seen the look of misery on Gansey’s face.

“What if he doesn’t, Jane?” Gansey’s voice was barely above a whisper.

“He will,” she insisted.

“He _better_ ,” Ronan added, darkly.

Noah first met Ronan a month before his father was killed.

It was early summer, and Ronan and Gansey were still working on making Monmouth habitable. Or, at least, Gansey was working. Ronan was sitting on a crate, fanning himself and watching Gansey work. Noah didn’t blame him; the humidity had made the air syrupy enough that even Noah could feel it. Besides, there was something captivating about watching Gansey—composed, refined Gansey—smashing old desks with a sledgehammer. He had not taken a break since they started that morning, and his breathing was noisier than Noah was used to. There was a long triangle of sweat just visible on the back of Gansey’s t-shirt, sticking it to his skin.

Noah tore his eyes from Gansey and sat beside Ronan, staring at him with open interest. Ronan had that bony, stretched look of a teenage boy who had grown a lot in a short amount of time. He was nice to look at, though: he had sharp features, long eyelashes, a prominent Adam’s apple.

Ronan glanced at Noah sidelong, asked with sarcastic sweetness, “Like what you see?”

It was not as much of a shock as it had been when Gansey spoke to him, but it was close. Noah ducked his head, fidgety with embarrassment. He wouldn’t have stared like that, if he’d known that Ronan could see him. Shoulders hunched, he muttered a quick, “Sorry.”

“You must be Noah. Gansey told me about you.”

The fact that he knew Noah’s name only made it worse. “What’d he say?”

Ronan smiled. “Mainly that you’re a fucking weirdo.”

It surprised Noah, how much that hurt. He’d missed a lot of things about being alive, but being called names wasn’t one of them.

“Weird’s better than boring.” Ronan said it as if it were a fact, rather than a reassurance, “We’re all a little weird, here. Ronan Lynch,” Ronan introduced himself. Instead of offering his hand for Noah to shake, he reached forward and grabbed Noah’s chin. “Hold on, you’ve got something on your face.”

Then, in a gesture that was unintentionally motherly, Ronan licked the pad of his thumb and tried to wipe at the smudge on Noah’s cheek.

“Damn, that shit’s really on there.” Ronan rubbed harder.

“You’re not going to fix it,” Noah said.

“Watch me.”

On the fourth day Noah was missing, Ronan was a lit fuse. He glared daggers at everything: the squeaky hinges of his door, the mess at the bottom of Chainsaw’s cage, his nearly empty tube of toothpaste with the cap that wouldn’t twist on right, Blue’s muddy boots abandoned by the door.

“This place is such a goddamn dumpster,” he growled, tipping a stack of dirty dishes into the sink and turning on the faucet with a vicious twist. When the dried dregs of spaghetti sauce refused to be scrubbed off a plate, he slammed it into the side of the sink. The plate shattered and Chainsaw launched herself from Ronan’s shoulder, screaming her distress. Blue looked from the bird’s frantic flapping to the badly-suppressed shaking of Ronan’s hands and thought, not for the first time, how much Chainsaw was a part of him.

Ronan grabbed another plate, swung his arm upwards to smash it, too.

“ _Lynch!_ ” Gansey shouted, in his tone of voice that always brought Ronan to heel.

“What!?” Ronan made the word a petulant challenge, but he put down the plate.

“It’s not going to bring him back,” Blue said, raising her voice to be heard over the ruckus Chainsaw was making. She had limited sympathy for his outbursts. She felt just as miserable as he did, and she wasn’t going around breaking things.

“I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about,” Ronan snapped. 

“Like hell you don’t. You expect me to believe your little prolonged temper tantrum has nothing to do with Noah—”

“Wow, that’s really insightful, have you ever thought about going to school to be a shrink, because you’re definitely obnoxious enough—” 

“You’re one to talk—”

Gansey let them fight; the worry had kept growing and growing in him, so that now he was strangled by it, listless with unhappiness. Blue and Ronan were too much alike for their own good. Let them scream at each other, since it was more satisfying than screaming at the indifferent, unlistening world, where everything was out of their control—where Niall Lynch was dead, and Maura Sargent was missing, and Noah was dead and missing. Gansey wasn’t going to stop them.

In the end, Ronan coaxed Chainsaw back to him and stalked into his room, slamming the door so hard the windows rattled. He didn’t emerge for the rest of the day. 

(In the small hours of the night, Ronan said Noah’s name over and over to the darkness, but he did not appear.)

The first time Noah met Adam, he was in the back seat of the Pig, curled forward, sitting on his hands. Noah didn’t know where Gansey was going, or where he had come from, but he was driving too fast, and his knuckles were white on the steering wheel. There was a bruise on Adam’s cheek that mirrored Noah’s.

“Are you dead, too?” Noah asked.

Adam didn’t respond at first, and Noah wondered if he could hear him. There was something absent in his face, in the way he stared into space, seeing nothing. His eyes were very blue.

“Only a little,” he said, dully.

Noah shifted nearer. Close up, Adam’s bruise wasn’t like the hole in his own face at all: Noah’s wound was black; Adam’s was colorful, livid red at the center, blurring out into blotchy clouds of purple and blue; Noah’s was empty; Adam’s full of displaced blood; Noah didn’t feel any pain; Adam did; Noah’s mark would not heal; Adam’s would.

Alone, the bruise didn’t mean much. Together with the blank look on Adam’s face, it meant plenty.

“Okay,” Noah said. He wanted to reach up and touch the bruise, to feel Adam’s body doing damage control, repairing itself in a way that Noah never would again. But he knew that he shouldn’t.

Carefully, Noah laid his head on Adam’s shoulder, and Adam let him. He hadn’t stopped staring at the same patch of nothing. Noah caught the first edges of Adam’s emotions—the aftershocks of fear, the confusion and the betrayal. They felt too familiar.

“I don’t mind.” Noah knew what he needed to hear, and for once, the words came easily to him. “If you’re a little dead.”

Adam’s breath caught. He didn’t know why, exactly, but the words went into him like a knife. He turned his gaze on Noah finally, and knew without being sure how that he was telling the truth. Noah didn’t need Adam to be okay, the way Gansey and Ronan did. He was okay with Adam being not okay.

“Thanks.”

On the fifth day, when Adam came to meet them at Nino’s, he announced, by way of hello, “Cabeswater says Noah is alright.”

Gansey, Blue, and Ronan all looked at him at once, surprise and relief on their faces.

“Nothing’s happened to him, he’s…” Adam paused, not sure quite how to put it. The impressions he received from Cabeswater weren’t always the easiest to explain concisely; the way it had been put to him had been something between _he is in his memories _and _he mourns_. “He’s just sad.”__

__“Noah’s usually sad,” Ronan said, with more viciousness than was necessary._ _

__“More sad than usual,” Adam amended. Something about him was remote and strange; he stayed like that for a little while after speaking to Cabeswater. As if being human had become a second language he was fluent in, but with some delay for internal translation. “You just need to give him time.”_ _

__Ronan narrowed his eyes. He didn’t like being told what he needed to do. He went back to biting one of the leather straps around his wrist, tense with worry and anger. “I’m gonna kick his ass when he shows his face,” he said._ _

__“Do you know where he went?” Blue asked. She thought that if she could just find him, talk to him, she could pull him out of his low._ _

__Adam shrugged, looking suddenly less distant and more vulnerable, more _Adam_. “Home.”_ _

____

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the delay on this chapter, and that it is so short. It was either two shorter chapters or one very long one, and I opted for the former. The next should be up in the near future.


	6. Chapter 6

_Still slow to tell_  
_memory from imagination, heaven_  
_from here and now,_  
_hell from here and now,_  
_death from childhood, and both of them_  
_from dreaming._  
\- Li-Young Lee, **A Hymn To Childhood**

“Do you ever go home?”

It was a few weeks after Ronan had found out Noah was dead. The two of them were stretched out on the hood of Ronan’s BMW. He had driven it into the middle of the golf course at some expensive country club, with a blanket and a flask of whiskey, to watch the Perseids. He’d meant to come alone, but when he’d looked into the front seat and seen Noah, he was glad.

“No,” Noah replied. He was worried that at any second someone would see them and call the cops. Ronan seemed incapable of having fun without breaking at least one law.

“Why not? In all the ghost stories I’ve read, people haunt their own houses. So how come you don’t even visit?”

This was before Ronan had figured out the loophole in his father’s will, back when he was still dreaming of the drive to the Barns every other night. The homesickness was worse at night, when he thought he might get away with it. He had a car, he knew the way; there was nothing physically stopping him from just going. Just a few words on a page, and what little was left of his self-control.

He couldn’t imagine _choosing_ exile.

Noah looked diffident and uncertain, gnawing on his bottom lip. Sometimes, when he was around Noah, Ronan got the same feeling in his chest as when he was feeding Chainsaw: a ferocious protectiveness that was part exasperation and part love. It terrified him, how nakedly vulnerable the two of them were. The sight of defenselessness in anything or anyone he cared for was enough to spark a hidden panic in Ronan; he couldn’t lose anyone else, he wouldn’t _allow_ anyone else to be taken from him.

“I don’t want to talk about…” Noah began, but his soft voice trailed off. He knew this wasn’t about him. He could hear the torrent of Ronan’s thoughts, as clearly as if they were his own.

Tracing the path of a falling star with his fingertip, he drew a brave breath, and said, “I did go home at first. I didn’t have anywhere else to go. But it’s pretty far from the ley line. No one could hear me or see me. I tried to tell them what had happened to me. Leave clues, you know, but...”

Noah shrugged, the single gesture encompassing failure after failure. Ronan was watching him, cheek pressed against the hood of the car. The starlight made him look blue and otherworldly and beautiful. Of all his friends, Ronan might have a chance at understanding. Noah had seen the way he was with Matthew.

“Eventually, I got sick of listening to my little sisters cry.”

Ronan’s throat went tight, the horrible pressure of oncoming tears starting behind his eyes. He willed them away, teeth clenched. He had a lot of practice at it. What a pair they were, the grieving and the grieved. Noah could not repair the damage that his murder had done to his family, any more than Ronan could repair the damage that his father’s murder had done to him.

  
  


Noah’s memories of the time after his murder were mercifully blurry. He retained only impressionistic fragments of the first few days: lying on the soft earth next to his corpse and not moving for a long time. Watching a raven land on his body’s broken face and take the first experimental peck. Listening to the conversations between the trees.

The first recollection that stood out clearly was when he had gone home. Noah didn’t know how he’d gotten there, only that he did somehow. When he arrived, there was a great stir in the house. His sisters were at home on a school day, and there were strangers—cops, he realized—hurrying around, looking busy. His aunt was there, too, holding his mother’s hands between her own. Numbly, Noah watched them all and thought that something bad must have happened: a burglary, a car crash, a madman with a gun at his sisters’ elementary school. He couldn’t seem to connect all this chaos with himself, and the bad thing that had just happened to him.

The policewoman nearest to his father was talking about traffic cameras, and email records, asking about trouble at school, reasons his son might have for running away. His father looked so furious—Noah didn’t know if that fury was directed at the questions the woman was asking, or at him. He saw the word ‘MISSING’ written on a lot of pieces of paper. That explained their frenetic energy: all those urgent whispers and gnawed nails and jittering knees were in fact manifestations of hope. They were trying to find him quickly.

Later, Noah would feel embarrassed by his own confusion at the time, his failure to process the situation. He spoke and acted as if in a dream, going up to his mother and father and saying, “I can show you where we went, if someone gets me a map.” 

No one looked up or stopped talking for even a moment. Noah thought, illogically, that they were refusing to acknowledge him because they were angry at him. Technically, Noah was supposed to call them first if he was leaving Aglionby campus for more than an hour or two. He hadn’t told them about any of his outings with Whelk; he didn’t want his father lecturing him about wasting his time, or either of his parents starting to think that he was spending an unusual amount of time with his roommate.

On the other side of the room, his two sisters were whispering together. They seemed to find the whole event terribly exciting, like something out of a book. They were making a great deal of their own fear and worry, without actually being afraid at all. Neither of them were old enough to believe any real harm could come to their big brother—it was unfathomable.

Noah tried to join them, to tease them about how lucky they were to get a day off school, but they also didn’t see or hear him. That was when he felt the first crack in the numbness encasing him, the first sick lurch of fear. His sisters wouldn’t ignore him.

“What’s going on?” he asked his mom, but she was staring at her cell phone. Noah looked over her shoulder to see what was on it. There was a text, and she was reading it so quickly that it was clear she had read it dozens of times before. Noah couldn’t keep up entirely, but he caught the gist. It was from his number, saying that he was leaving, that he hated her and his father, that they shouldn’t come looking because they wouldn’t ever find him.

“But I didn’t send that,” he said, hurt and confused. No one heard him. He felt for his phone in his pockets, but it wasn’t there. He didn’t understand what was happening. Next to him, Mrs. Czerny shivered, suddenly cold.

Unbidden, a fragment of memory broke upon Noah’s mind: Whelk, leaning over him, breathing very fast. At first, Noah thought Whelk was going to kiss him, but then he sat back with something clutched in his hand. When he wiped some of the blood off, Noah realized it was his cell phone. It must have fallen out of his pocket while he was thrashing on the ground.

Whelk had taken his phone and sent the text, so that his parents would think that he had run away. So that no one would realize he was the one who had hurt Noah. No, not hurt him. _Murdered_ him.

It sank in, for the first time, that he was dead.

Noah ran to the bathroom to be sick. His stomach was empty—he didn’t even have a stomach, anymore—but he retched and retched. No one heard him, came to rub his back until the sickness passed. They were all in the next room, hurrying to find him. Not realizing it was too late for it to matter how long they took.

When he stopped heaving, Noah tried to splash some water on his face, but he couldn’t get the sink to turn on. He looked in the mirror and saw his reflection—his cheek was dark, concave. When he looked at it, he remembered the sound his breaking bone had made. He was worried that he was going to be sick again, so he broke the mirror.

The sound of it must have attracted some attention, but he didn’t stay to find out. He drifted upstairs, found himself in his bedroom. It was the only home he had ever known, the center of his universe. He had spent his whole life in this room. Practicing tying his shoes, writing book reports, throwing tantrums, playing recorder, painting his little sister’s nails. But when he looked at it now, it seemed like a stranger’s: those science fair ribbons and posters and CDs and cleats belonged to another boy. A carefree boy who assumed he would have a future, who didn’t know that people could smile at you one minute and murder you the next.

Why had he ever left this place, where he had been safe? Why had he agreed to be a part of Whelk’s stupid hunt for the ley line? Why hadn’t he just ditched Whelk, the way the rest of their friends had ditched him when his father got thrown in jail?

Noah wanted to go to sleep and wake up and let it all be a horrible dream – wasn’t it so much more likely that this was a nightmare, that he wasn’t really dead? So he crawled under the covers of his bed, cocooned himself so that no light could get in. The enclosed space never got hot or stuffy, the way it had when he was a child hiding from imagined monsters.

“Please don’t let it be real,” he prayed, hands pressed over his face as the tears started to come. “Please don’t let this be real. Please please _please_ don’t let me be dead.” He said the words over and over until they lost all meaning, until he was bawling too hard to say anything at all. He didn’t bother to be quiet. What did it matter? No one could hear him. Besides, he was a ghost. Sobbing and wailing was what ghosts were supposed to do, wasn’t it?

  
  


At first, Ronan thought the thunder had woken him up. It was distant, but getting closer. The trees were noisy with the wind that always came before a storm. Then, his phone buzzed a second time. Ronan knew it wasn’t Declan: he called rather than texting like a normal person, and he wouldn’t be awake at this hour. Ronan remembered that Adam had gotten a phone and quickly checked the messages.

It was not from Adam. The number was one he did not recognize, and the text read:

_40 augusta street_  
_please come get me_  
_-casper_

Ronan didn’t know where he was going, or why Noah was texting him, but two minutes later he was driving, the GPS on his phone announcing directions as the rain started to fall heavy and loud on the roof of the car. The nearest Augusta Street was two towns over, in the foothills to the northeast. Ronan had been this way once before, for Noah’s funeral.

The house was set far back on a private driveway. Between it and the road was a rather ostentatious gate that was emphatically shut. Ronan pulled over next to it, uncertain how he was going to get past, when he spotted Noah.

Even illuminated by the bright headlights of the BMW, and the occasional flashes of lightning, he was only an outline delineating the suggestion of a boy. He was hunched over by the ditch at the side of the rode. Beneath him was a large cardboard box. Ronan could see the rain going through Noah and splashing on the lid.

Ronan got out of the car.

“What the hell, Noah?” he said. It was so good to see Noah again, but so terrible to see him in this state. Noah didn’t speak. He walked slowly to the back of the BMW and tried to open the trunk; Ronan watched as his hand slipped through the handle again and again, translucent and weak.

“Help.” Noah’s voice was smaller than Ronan had ever heard it.

Ronan opened the trunk and, prompted by a wordless gesture from Noah, heaved the somewhat soggy box in. He got back into the car and Noah joined him. Ronan knew it was an illusion, that Noah had no body to actually get wet, but he looked like a drowned rat. With his hair plastered to his head, his eyes looked even huger than usual. His mouth moved as if he were trying to speak, but Ronan could hear nothing. He remembered what Noah had told him months before, about how far his home was from the ley line.

“Hold on.”

Ronan turned the car around and drove back the way he’d come, unable to ignore the way his heart was racing. Could it have done permanent damage to Noah, staying so far from the ley line for so long? What if just bringing him back to Monmouth wasn’t enough? Should he call and wake up Blue?

Another idea occurred to him, so that, when the turnoff came for Henrietta, Ronan did not take it. He drove on, leaving the paved roads, taking the winding dirt path beneath the trees. In the rain and the darkness, the ruined church looked monstrous, all broken stone and yawning shadows.

“Why did you bring me here?” Noah asked. He sounded scared, but his voice was louder, less like an echo.

“Because it’s the only place I know is right on the ley line, and you’re almost out of battery over there.”

Noah shivered, but he didn’t argue. Ronan shut the engine off and watched as Noah gradually became opaque. Soon, the awful stillness left him and he started to become his usual fidgety self again. The rain had not lessened; the huge drops that fell from the trees provided a strange, hypnotic percussion to the scene.

“I texted you on my sister’s phone,” Noah said, in response to the question Ronan hadn’t asked yet. “I deleted it after.”

“Why didn’t you just teleport, or whatever it is you usually do?”

Noah shrugged, plucking at a fraying thread on his cuff. “I wasn’t strong enough.”

Ronan told himself that he was only shaking because of his damp clothes and Noah’s cold, but he knew it was a lie. He wanted to hold Noah to his chest the way he held Chainsaw when she was frightened, to surround him and protect him from things that it was too late to change.

“What’s in the box?”

Noah turned away from Ronan, hugging himself with his arms. “Stuff.” Ronan let the silence hang until Noah added, “My stuff. Mom finally packed it all up and put it in the attic.”

Ronan could picture it – Noah’s parents, leaving his room untouched for all those years, hoping beyond hope. Noah, coming back for the first time since his funeral and finding the space converted into an office, or a guest room, with all the detritus Noah left behind shoved up in the attic, with all the other trash that no one had the heart to get rid of.

“There was more. I only took a few things. They won’t notice.”

Noah knew that if it had been anyone else in the driver’s seat, they would have offered him platitudes. _Of course they still love you_ or _It’s healthy they are moving on._ But Ronan didn’t do that, and Noah loved him for it.

Because he knew it was healthy. He knew it was necessary. He knew it would probably be good for him, too, in the long run. They’d moved on from him, so he would be forced to move on from them.

But knowing all that didn’t make it feel any less like abandonment.

There was one small comfort, amidst all the rest: Ronan had come for him. He had not meant the text as a test, but if it had been one, Ronan would have passed. Noah had needed him and Ronan had driven through wind and rain without question to get to him.

He didn’t think Whelk would have ever done that.

“Gansey’s been freaking out,” Ronan said. Noah knew that meant, _I’ve been freaking out._ “You were gone a week and a half.”

“Sorry,” Noah said, and meant it.

“You can’t just go missing like that anymore. I know that you used to, but it’s different now. We– people get worried. So you have to cut it the fuck out.”

Noah twisted in his seat to face Ronan. Ronan couldn’t imagine how much he was asking for. Would it be possible, not to allow himself any lapses? To live from moment to moment and not retreat when things got too hard? A few months ago, he wouldn’t have been able to. But now, with Blue to keep him strong during the day, and Ronan to anchor him to at night, and Adam and Gansey to notice when he wasn’t around, he thought that, just maybe, he could.

And when he saw the look on Ronan’s face, he couldn’t say no. “Okay,” he agreed, “I’ll try.”

The storm was moving away, the thunder soft and resonant in the distance. Noah could see Ronan’s Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat around things he didn’t know how to say.

“Want to know something funny?” Noah said.

“What?”

“This is where I had my first kiss.”

He didn’t know what he was doing, why he was telling Ronan this. He couldn’t stop thinking about the contrast. How that afternoon with Whelk had seemed perfect: the sun and warmth, the comfort, the freedom and easy happiness. How tonight seemed the opposite. It was dark and rainy, and both of them were damp and cold. Ronan was sleep-deprived and Noah still felt weak. Too much had happened for either of them to feel free.

But Whelk had been Whelk, and Ronan was Ronan, and that was the only detail that made a difference.

All this time, he had been so afraid of repeating his mistakes. Afraid that if he let himself trust Ronan, he would be betrayed, like the last time. That fear had been a barrier between them: invisible, unspeakable. But sitting there, shivering in the front seat, Noah felt that barrier crumbling like the walls of Jericho. When he looked at Ronan now, he didn’t see the things that made him like Whelk. He didn’t even see, particularly, the things that made him unlike Whelk. He was just _Ronan_ , complete, without reference to anyone else. Difficult, loyal, abrasive, awkward, wonderful, magical Ronan. Imperfect, but _good_.

Ronan was not Whelk, and neither was Noah the same boy who had waited to be kissed that summer afternoon. He was never, ever going to be that boy again. But maybe that was okay. He wasn’t the same boy that his family had put into boxes and a coffin, but he was someone, and there were people out there who knew him for what he was, and thought that he was enough.

Noah didn’t wait for someone else to make the first move, this time. All the reasons why he shouldn’t do this slipped from his mind until there was just Ronan, and the silence, and the air between them. He put a hand on the back of Ronan’s neck, and Ronan didn’t pull away or ask what Noah thought he was doing. That seemed like a kind of permission.

So Noah tilted up his face and kissed him.

Ronan was a shyer kisser than Noah had expected. He always projected an air of such experience and confidence, but his mouth moved slowly against Noah’s, unpracticed and tentative. Ronan’s lips were chapped and Noah’s were cold, and the angle was awkward, but none of that mattered to them. The kiss was more important for what it communicated than for the actual sensation of it. It was a mutual confession, a mutual recognition.

After a few minutes they pulled apart, foreheads resting together.

“Now it’s where you had yours, too,” Noah guessed. A small, mischievous grin had snuck onto his face, “Wasn’t it?”

Ronan wanted to object, but he could think of no way to do it that wouldn’t be an outright lie. It had been his first kiss.

“Does it even count if it’s with a ghost? I’m pretty sure it doesn’t count.”

“Shut up,” Noah said, “Now let’s get home, before Gansey wakes up and sees you’re not there and calls in the coast guard.”

Ronan started the car up. “Home it is,” he said.

  
  



	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've made a second fanmix of songs to accompany the fic, which you can find here: http://8tracks.com/platoapproved/please-work-with-what-is-left-2
> 
> I wanted to thank everyone who has read this far and who has supported me so kindly. It means more than you know.

_Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives ._  
\- Barbara Kingsolver, **The Lacuna**

When he’d been alive, Noah had been quick to judge fairytales where curses could be lifted by something as simple as a kiss. Every time he read one of them to his sisters— _Snow White, Sleeping Beauty_ , or the like—he had thought to himself how ridiculous they were. A kiss couldn’t right wrongs, or heal wounds. The power of ‘true love’s first kiss’ was an outdated trope, repeated by lazy storytellers. It was all propaganda, fed to children to keep them from seeing reality.

He had been so certain he understood the truth of the world, back then. 

Of course, Noah’s cynicism had been only skin-deep. He had thought it was mature to say life was too terrible for happy endings, but had never considered that _his_ life might have an unhappy ending, right until the moment it did.

(Noah had told Blue more than once how, when he looked back at the boy he had been then, it was like thinking about another person entirely. The person he was now had been stitched together loosely out of the tatters that were left when that boy was torn to shreds. He was fragments, rearranged clumsily, with many pieces missing. He could hardly believe he had ever been that other, whole Noah.

“It might be a bit different because you’re a spirit, and because—” Blue had hesitated. Talking about Noah’s murder had never gotten easy, for her, “—because you went through something so awful, but I’m pretty sure that’s how everyone feels about their younger self. I know I do.”

She was always so quick to say he wasn’t any different from the rest of them. He loved her for it, even on the days when he didn’t believe her.)

On the drive back from the ruined church, watching dawn breaking over the ragged hills, Noah touched his lips and remembered how he had scoffed at those stories with their magical kisses. He had laughed at ghost stories back then, too. Had he been wrong on both counts? If a ghost could be real, why couldn’t a kiss be magic? Blue certainly seemed to think they could be, and Blue was usually right. 

Based on what Noah had learned about these things, it made sense. Magic relied on emotion, intention, and energy more than on incantations or rules that could be written down. He knew that gesture and touch could manipulate the energy inside people—that was why he could think more clearly when he held Blue’s hand. So why shouldn’t a kiss be part of that?

As he sat, enveloped by the thudding bass from the BMW’s speakers, watching the white dashes on the road race past, Noah couldn’t help smiling. It _felt_ like magic. He hadn’t awoken from a cursed sleep, or transformed from a monster into a man, but the kiss had set off a strange alchemy inside him. Noah could feel it in his chest like a spreading chemical reaction, like his insides were baking soda and vinegar. After he had slept beside Ronan that first time, Noah had felt as if the dissolved pieces of himself were starting to slowly reconstitute themselves. Now that feeling was back, ten times stronger than before. It was easy to think. It was easy to listen, and look, and stay solid. If there had been anyone else around on those empty roads, Noah felt sure they would be able to see him.

He thought about telling Ronan, but decided not to. He didn’t want to speak too soon, in case he was wrong. He could be reading too much into temporary happiness, and why get Ronan’s hopes up, when he wasn’t _sure_?

Best to keep it to himself, for the time being.

“We should do that more. If you want,” Noah said, breaking the trance of the music, and the road, and the motion of the car.

Ronan glanced over at him. “What, make out?” he asked, eyebrows raised.

“Yeah,” Noah sighed, smiling, his voice dreamy. “We should do that _a lot_.”

Ronan laughed for miles.

Gansey was a mess.

Noah could feel it before Ronan had even stopped the car. He had woken up to find both of them gone, and his loneliness and guilt were a dense fog, sprawling out from his body and throughout Monmouth, seeping into the bricks and the wood, filling up the dusty emptiness of the first floor.

Ronan had been right: no matter how hard it was, he couldn’t vanish like that again. Not if this was the result.

He didn’t wait for Ronan to park. One minute he was in the front seat, and the next he was draping himself over Gansey’s bent shoulders.

“I’m sorry,” Noah breathed, resting his chin against the crook of Gansey’s neck. He felt Gansey tense, terrified by his sudden presence, then relax in understanding and relief. Noah hadn’t meant to startle him, any more than he had meant to make him unhappy these last few days, but it was too late to take back either.

 _I need to do better_ , Noah thought, laying a cold hand over Gansey’s racing heart, wishing he could calm it. _To be gentler, with all of them._

“I lost track of time. I’m sorry I made you worry.” Gansey put his hand on top of Noah’s, pressing it to his chest. Funny, how Gansey could be so grandiose and passionate about Glendower and his quest, yet so timid and uncertain when it came to little intimacies like this. Noah laced their fingers together. It felt right; the two of then, entwined. The way they had been for so long.

“How was home?” Gansey asked, tentatively. He was so scared to say the wrong thing. Noah didn’t know how he could have ever resented him. It wasn’t Gansey’s fault that he missed his family, that the world was racing ahead and leaving him behind. None of it had ever been Gansey’s fault. 

“Awful. I’m never going back.”

“Oh,” Gansey said. It wasn’t what he’d been expecting.

“I guess this will have to do for home, from now on,” Noah said, knowing how corny it would sound, but sure that Gansey would understand. Monmouth was Gansey’s home, but it wasn’t anyone else’s. Ronan lived there with him, but he belonged at the Barns, among his father’s strange dreams. To Adam it was a prison to be avoided, to Blue it was a clubhouse to be envied.

But if Noah had a chance of belonging anywhere anymore, Monmouth was it.

“…If I’m still welcome?” he added, uneasily.

“Of course,” Gansey said, without a moment of hesitation.

As if on cue, Ronan came in the front door with the box of Noah’s things. Noah remembered how Ronan had carried in Adam’s bags, after Adam had left home for good. How remarkable the two of them were: Ronan, fearless and protective, ready to pull his friends out of the darkness at a moment’s notice; Gansey, loving and generous, wanting so badly to be a circle of light they could all take refuge in. 

Ronan looked at the two of them over the box. For a moment, his face was unreadable: Noah could not tell if he was surprised, or glad, or jealous. Then his expression settled back into a familiar Ronan Lynch scowl.

“Oh, no no, I’m fine, don’t both of you get up at once,” he complained, making his way towards Noah’s room. He had to navigate through the model of Henrietta, which was treacherous with a large, heavy box blocking his view, “You two keep having your little Hallmark moment while I break my neck over here.”

Gansey said, “ _Lynch_ ,” at the exact same moment that Noah flipped him off.

“If I ask you something, do you promise not to laugh?” Noah mumbled.

In the brightly-lit aisles of the fabric store, Noah looked plenty solid, but his body language was eloquent with discomfort: his hands shoved deeply into his pockets, his shoulders hunched up around his ears, his feet scuffing soundlessly on vinyl floor. He was also, Blue saw, blushing, his cheeks and ears going pink. She had never seen him so colorful, before.

“Of course.”

Noah had been waiting for three days for the right opportunity to broach this subject with Blue. Now was just right: the store had the eerie privacy of an empty public place. There was no one to hear them but the girl at the counter, who was deeply engrossed in a game on her phone.

“You said that psychics have always told you that if you kiss your true love, he’ll die, right?”

She tensed visibly; Noah knew that by talking about this, he was treading very close to Blue’s heart. She could pretend all she wanted that she was resigned to never kiss anyone, that the dire predictions of her mother and aunts and strangers meant nothing to her. But Noah knew better.

“Have you ever heard of kissing doing anything else? Magically, I mean.”

Blue tilted her head to one side, nonplussed. “Like what?”

Noah shrugged, taking his hands out of his pockets to play with a nearby bolt of polka-dot fabric, pretending to be interested in it. 

“Like… with you, it’s supposed to kill, but has the opposite ever happened? Where a person kisses someone they love, and they- they get better, if they were sick?”

He couldn’t bring himself to say _come back to life_. It was too much to hope for, too impossible. He couldn’t let his mind come to close to it.

Blue stared at him as he tried to re-fold the bolt of fabric. Even after multiple attempts, he couldn’t get it neat enough to put back on the shelf. His hands were shaking. Wordlessly, Blue took it from him and folded it against her chest with a few practiced movements, put it back where it belonged.

“I kissed Ronan,” Noah blurted. 

Blue’s eyebrows shot upward and she actually pressed a hand on either side of her face in comical surprise.

“The day before yesterday. And, um, yesterday too. And today.”

Blue let out a short, involuntary giggle that made the woman at the front counter look up and make sure everything was alright before returning her attention to her phone. Noah rubbed a hand against the back of his neck, embarrassed and a tiny bit proud. It was nice, to make Blue so happy for once. It had occurred to Noah that she might disapprove; Blue and Ronan were both so volatile, and it was hard to predict what they would think of one another on any given day.

“But what about his endless quest to get into Adam’s pants?” Blue asked, delighted and confused.

Noah couldn’t help grinning. The fact that everyone—even _Gansey_ —had picked up on Ronan’s badly-hidden secret crush on Adam was endlessly endearing to Noah. “Oh, he’s still questing. The two aren’t mutually exclusive.”

If it were someone else, this part of the conversation would have lasted longer. But Blue merely nodded in understanding. Monogamy had never been held in terribly high regard at 300 Fox Way.

“And obviously, kissing him’s a good thing on its own, but I’ve also been feeling… different.” He gnawed his bottom lip, elated and doubtful and happy to be sharing this with someone finally. “Better. Like I do when I hold your hand, but all the time.”

In fact, Blue _had_ noticed that Noah had been different, these last few days. Quicker, louder, more present. She had put it down to some adjustment that Adam had made to the ley line.

“I thought it might be the ley line, too,” Noah responded, “Or maybe that getting sleep was helping. But I think maybe it’s… all three.”

“I’ve never heard of it happening before, but I can ask Calla and Persephone what they think.” Blue’s happiness faltered, then, as she thought about how she would ask her mother, too, if her mother had not run off.

Noah didn’t want her to stop smiling. He pulled the nearest bolt of white cloth from the shelf, unfolded it, and threw it over his head. With quiet solicitude, he said, “Boo!”

_Some of it probably IS bullshit_ , Noah would write in his journal, late that night. _Like, the whole thing in these stories with it being a first kiss is probably just the usual weird purity and virginity obsession. Plus, I don’t really buy the idea of ‘true love’, like there’s only one._

_I love Ronan._

(It took some courage to write the words, even privately.)

_But I love Blue, too, and Gansey and Adam. It’s not like one is true and the others are fake, or less important. Just different._

It was true that kissing Blue had not set off the same alchemy inside him, but Noah thought that was because, for Blue, kissing was too wrapped up in death. She had only kissed him at times while her heart was full of hopelessness, and he could easily see how that would stop any kind of magic from happening. It didn’t mean he didn’t love her, or she didn’t love him.

_Maybe true love was never supposed to mean a single soulmate, or anything like that. Maybe something got lost in translation, and originally, ‘true love’ was just any love that went deep enough that you could see the truth of a person._

Noah couldn’t help thinking of Whelk. He had thought he loved Whelk, but the more that he remembered about their time together, the more he could see that he’d been deceiving himself. He had loved the best parts of Whelk while desperately pretending not to notice the worst. There had always been a vein of cruelty and contempt running through their friendship, a rottenness just beneath the surface. Noah had not loved the truth of Whelk, and Whelk had not loved Noah at all.

On the nights when Ronan could sleep, Noah slept by his side. On the nights when he couldn’t, they would lie together, sharing earbuds (“You should learn to play this one”; “You want me to?”; “Yeah”; “I will if you’ll sing it”; “…Deal”), or watching TV on Ronan’s laptop (“How can you be afraid of _Ghost Hunters_ when you are an actual ghost”; Noah’s voice, muffled by the blanket he was hiding under, “Shut up”; Ronan’s harsh, lovely laugh), or else kissing for hours on end (they had gone no further than that, yet—there was still a lot shame embedded in Ronan like shrapnel, and Noah knew it would take time to dig it all out).

As time went on, Noah thought that, perhaps, he ought to tell Ronan about Whelk. Ronan hated lies so much; Noah knew it would be worse, the longer he waited. Better to rip off the band-aid and get it over with. But he simply couldn’t bring himself to say the words, no matter how he tried.

He didn’t want to dwell on Whelk, anyway. He wanted to think of only Ronan, filling mugs with hot water and honey to sip in between their kisses and keep his mouth warm. Ronan, lying on his stomach and explaining the intricacies of his tattoo as Noah traced them with his fingertips. Ronan, blinking at him from a few inches away, face soft, before he put his armor on. He wanted this uncomplicated contentment, for as long as he could have it.

In the end, the past caught up with him, the way it always did.

One Sunday, Noah told Ronan to go to church without him. He only ever went to keep Ronan company, anyway, and on that day he had a different plan. Noah had decided to do something about the mess in Ronan’s room. That seemed like the sort of thing that a thoughtful boyfriend—if that was what he was—would do.

He cleaned Chainsaw’s cage, then started throwing away anything that was obviously trash. The number of old, empty liquor bottles made Noah’s chest ache. It had been weeks since Noah had seen Ronan drunk, and he was glad. He wasn’t against drinking, per se, but Ronan only seemed to do it when he was miserable. 

Next, Noah sorted the clutter into categories. There was a pile for clothes, a pile for electronics, and a pile for dream things that Noah couldn’t begin to fathom. An hour and a half into the cleanup, Noah came across Ronan’s schoolbooks and a stack of old returned homework and tests. The page on top had a long note written at the top, in a handwriting that Noah knew well.

It was a Latin project, and the handwriting was Whelk’s. The note tersely acknowledged Ronan’s skill with grammar before remarking that the subject matter he had chosen was ‘inappropriate’ and that he ‘ought to take his education more seriously’.

Noah was distantly surprised that, of all things, Whelk’s handwriting should make him feel queasy. Maybe it was the shock of seeing it when he was least expecting it: he had been the farthest thing from Noah’s mind. The suddenness of the reminder was jarring, violent. It was easy to forget that Ronan had _known_ Whelk, had seen him and spoken to him day in and day out, as recently as last spring.

Noah set the box aside and tried his best not to think about it. Soon, Ronan got back from church. He immediately launched into a diatribe about some dickish thing Declan had said, and went on for a good ten minutes before he realized anything was different. 

“Noah, what the fuck are you doing to my room?” he asked.

“Rescuing it,” Noah replied. He hoped whatever Ronan had been complaining about wasn’t too important: he had tried to listen, but the words had drifted in one ear and out the other.

Ronan groaned, yanking off his tie and lobbing it in Noah’s direction. “But I wanted to go back to sleep.” He glared at his bed, onto which Noah was placing all the unidentified dream objects he came across.

“Too bad.”

In protest, Ronan laid down in the middle of the floor, so that Noah had to step over him every few seconds while he cleaned. Normally, Ronan’s petulance would have made him smile, but right now, he couldn’t seem to feel anything but cold.

The more Noah tried to push Whelk’s note from his mind, the more he could not help thinking about it. The really funny thing was, Whelk had never taken his own education very seriously. If he had gotten a note like the one he’d given Ronan when he was at Aglionby himself, he would have shown it to Noah with laughs of delight, then taped it to their dorm door as a badge of honor. He had done that, once, with a physics quiz that he had failed by falling asleep during the middle of it. 

Ronan’s door was plastered with photocopies of all the speeding tickets he had gotten.

Noah didn’t notice when reality slid away from under his feet. One moment, he was untangling an unidentified power cord, and the next, he was standing by the window, on the other side of the room. He didn’t know how he had gotten there. The door was closed—it hadn’t been a moment ago.

Ronan was in a different place, too: sitting on the bed, amidst the dream objects, with his forehead between his knees. His hands were pressed over his ears, and there was something wrong with his breathing. It had gone shallow, ragged, and loud. Noah had sat with Gansey through enough panic attacks to recognize one. But he had no idea what had caused it.

“Ronan?”

Noah touched Ronan’s knee, and he jerked away as if he’d been burned. When he looked up, Noah thought had never seen a face quite so full of horror. He was pale, eyes wide and too wet, all the muscles of his neck tensed.

The horror lasted only a handful of seconds. In its wake came rage. Not the usual Ronan Lynch anger that Noah was so used to, but visceral, explosive rage.

“Fuck,” Ronan croaked. “Fuckfuckfuck. Noah, why would— how the _fuck_ could you do that?”

The images in Ronan’s mind were too strong for Noah to block them out. He saw himself, sprawled on the floor of Ronan’s room, making inhuman sounds of pain and pleading as his body rocked with the impact of invisible blows. One whole side of his face was concave, pulpy, _red_.

Then he saw another face, or what remained of it, surrounded by a halo of blood and brain matter. Noah had never seen a picture of Niall Lynch, but he knew that this was him. This was what Ronan had seen, that morning when his whole world had ended.

It wasn’t hard to connect the dots. He had let himself get into such a state about Whelk that he had re-enacted his death, and Ronan had seen it. Of course, Ronan had always known that Noah was beaten to death, but knowing it and seeing it were two very, very different things. Ronan had watched Whelk kill him, and he had remembered finding his father’s fresh corpse, and all that old trauma had lurched up from the depths, as terrible as when it was new.

“I didn’t mean to,” Noah whispered, wretchedly. In the face of Ronan’s rage, he quaked. What apology would do, for this? He deserved every bit of that hate. Intentional or not, he had stabbed Ronan where he was weakest, and ten thousand _sorries_ wouldn’t stop the bleeding. 

“Get out.” Ronan wasn’t yelling anymore, and somehow, that was worse. His voice was brittle. “I don’t care where you go, just get the fuck out of my face. Right. Now.”

Noah didn’t need telling twice. The next thing he knew, he was in the green shade under a beech tree. Blue was sitting there, a National Geographic open over her thighs, looking at glossy pictures of Quetzals. Noah did not sit beside her so much as crumple to the ground and bury his face against her shoulder. He heard her talking, asking him questions, but the words were distant and indecipherable. He wanted desperately to let himself disappear, but he did not. He had promised. With Blue’s energy to prop him up, he held on—he was barely a shadow of a boy, but he was there.

He didn’t deserve sanctuary from this, anyway.

That night, in the darkness of his room, Ronan said, “Noah?”

When there was no response, he repeated, louder, “Noah?”

The door creaked open a few inches. Noah peered in, his face mostly skull, suspended in the dark. But he had come.

Ronan didn’t do apologies. Even if he owed Noah one, it wasn’t going to happen.

(“He can’t help it any more than you can help making those night horrors,” Gansey had scolded, while pulling a shard of glass from Ronan’s knuckles with a pair of tweezers. He could be so intolerable when he was right.)

“Come in.”

Noah drifted in, heard the _clink_ of glass hitting the floorboards as he tripped over an empty bottle. He thought he had missed one while he was cleaning, only to realize a moment later it was new.

“We’re not gonna talk about it,” Ronan said, voice slurry. It was not a request, but a demand. “Ever.”

“Okay.”

“That includes you apologizing,” Ronan clarified.

“Okay.”

“Good.” Ronan patted the pillow beside him, but Noah did not come any closer. Ronan repeated the gesture with more vehemence, and Noah noticed the bandage.

“Does asking what happened to your hand count as talking about it?” he asked.

“Yes,” Ronan said. 

(“Are you sure you won’t let me take you to the hospital?” Gansey had asked, for the third time. Ronan told him, “Declan would see the bill,” and the matter was closed.)

Noah was pressing a hand over his cheek. Ronan could see the tracks that tears had left on his cheeks.

“I punched a window.”

“Oh.”

Noah laid down beside Ronan, careful not to touch him first. Ronan wrapped himself around Noah, all long limbs and warm pulse. He ran a hand through Noah’s soft hair, and for a moment, Noah was worried he would start to cry again.

“Can I say it just once?”

Ronan sighed. “Once,” he warned.

“I’m _sorry_ ,” Noah said, voice breaking on the second word.

 _Me too_ , Ronan thought, and Noah heard.

Noah pressed his lips to the back of Ronan’s bandaged hand.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so so much for your patience. I'm sorry this latest chapter took almost a month to write and post - there were relatives, and international travel, and illness, and deadlines, and all manner of distractions. Nonetheless, thank you for waiting. The next chapter should be up within the next week, and then we should be in the home stretch, winding down towards the end of the story.

_Under the seams runs the pain._  
\- Anne Carson, **Autobiography of Red**

Noah’s senses didn’t work as well as they had when he was alive. Since he’d died, the world appeared a little flatter, a little blurrier, a little desaturated. Sounds became garbled more easily, and he couldn’t stand loud music—a real problem, considering Ronan was Ronan. His sense of touch depended on his emotional state: the more miserable he was, the harder it became to feel textures, pressure, temperature. And as for taste and smell, they were gone entirely.

Which was why, when Noah opened his eyes in an unfamiliar forest and smelled the moss and trees and damp earth, he knew something was up.

He breathed in as deeply as he could, filling his lungs with the cold, fresh air. It didn’t feel like breathing normally did – a habit more than a necessity. He felt as if his lungs were really drawing from the air in them, like a living body would do.

Movement caught his eye, and he spotted a small girl in a white hat, peering out at him from behind the trunk of a tree. When she saw him looking, she ducked out of sight. A few seconds later, though, she peeked once more. It was clear that she wasn’t just shy, in the way that small children could be, but actually frightened.

It was good that she was wary; even if he hadn’t been a ghost, he was a stranger. “Hey, kiddo,” he called, in the voice he had used on his little sisters’ more timid friends. He didn’t come any closer, letting her be the one to approach him, if she wanted.

“Are you okay?” He didn’t know where he was, or how he got here, but if this girl needed help, he was going to do the best that he could. When she didn’t say anything, he added, “Did you get lost?”

She shook her head. “I live here.” Her voice was familiar somehow, but Noah couldn’t put a finger on what it reminded him of.

All around Noah, the trees were beginning to move. They bent down towards him, reaching out small branches to pluck at his clothes. He stood very still, letting the wet leaves run along his arms and back and neck. The attention felt fond, rather than malicious, but it was still creepy. A dozen interlaced voices came on the air, whispering _little one! you are finally here!_

“…Cabeswater?” Noah guessed.

Wind rustled through the trees like bright laughter, which Noah took as a yes.

“Hello,” Noah said. He felt strange doing it, but he patted the grey, knotted bark of a nearby trunk in greeting. 

The little girl came out from behind her tree, no longer afraid. Apparently, Cabeswater’s recognition was enough to gain her trust. She stared up at Noah; her eyes were too large, and there was something not human about her scrawny stillness.

“Did you come here so he could fix you?” she asked.

“What?” Noah said.

“The _Greywaren_ , silly.”

As if on cue, Ronan stepped out from the shadows between the trees. Noah looked between the two of them. He wanted to ask the girl to explain what she had meant, but Ronan’s presence had sparked a sudden idea in Noah’s mind.

“This is a dream! You’re dreaming!” he exclaimed. It made sense: why shouldn’t he have all his senses, if it were a dream? Besides, Ronan’s dreams were tied to Cabeswater, and Cabeswater was here. If Ronan could pull dream things into reality, could he pull real things into dreams? Surely he could, particularly if the real thing in question was as insubstantial as Noah.

Ronan hadn’t come any closer. He was staring at Noah with his hands deep in his pockets, his eyes narrowed in suspicion. “No shit, Sherlock.”

From his non-reaction, Noah thought that Ronan must not understand the full scope of what was happening. “Ronan, it’s me. Like, the _real_ me. Not just a version in your head.”

“Yeah, right,” Ronan said sarcastically, waving a dismissive hand.

“I _mean_ it!” Noah said, plaintively. “We’re both asleep and I think you pulled me into your dream somehow.”

“You’re not gonna trick me into any existential shit, so stop trying,” Ronan warned, though he addressed it to the air at large. He clearly thought Noah was only a facet of the dream, lying to him. Noah wondered if that happened often: if the dream tried to convince Ronan that _it_ was the waking world, and everything else was the illusion.

“Well, then, how can I prove it to you?”

Ronan met his gaze at last. He was different in the light of his own dream forest: careful and skittish, dwarfed by the age and the power of this place. He looked ready to issue another warning, until he noticed the strange girl clinging to the leg of Noah’s pants. He visibly reassessed.

“Alright,” Ronan agreed, “I’m going to tell you a secret. If you really are the real Noah, you’ll know the answer after we wake up.”

It seemed like a good enough plan to Noah. “What’s the secret?”

“When you’re awake, you have to tell me the first thing I brought out of a dream.”

“Okay, what was it?”

Ronan’s gaze slid away. “ _Who_ ,” he corrected, quietly. “It was Matthew.”

Noah’s mouth formed a perfectly round ‘o’ of surprise. Ronan glared at him, chin tilted up, arms crossed tightly over his chest. Defiant, and fragile. This must be relatively new information to Ronan. Otherwise, Noah was sure he would have picked up on it. (He didn’t mean to eavesdrop on Ronan’s thoughts, but mass was very boring. He had heard plenty of Ronan’s thoughts about Matthew, and none of them had included anything about him being a dream thing, much less a dream thing of Ronan’s own making.)

Noah had a feeling that Ronan was not just telling him this as a test: if all he wanted was to check if Noah was real, he could have told him to remember just about any fact or phrase. No, this was a confession. Ronan needed, desperately, to tell someone, even if it was only a figment in a dream.

“I’ll do that,” Noah said, solemnly.

The dream lurched around them, the green from the trees starting to bleed into the air. Noah had a feeling that the dream was ending. A growl came up from under the earth, and ground started to shift beneath him. Suddenly, the little girl pulled Noah towards Ronan, closing the gap between them. She pressed their hands together urgently.

“You have to hold on,” she yelled to Ronan in rapid-fire Latin, “Or he’ll be stuck.”

Fear coursed through Noah like a flood. It had not occurred to him that he might be trapped here, in this dream place, if Ronan did not pull him out of it. It didn’t take much to frighten Noah, and this was the closest he had come to real danger in a long time. What if Ronan let go, _left_ him here, deliberately? Or what if Noah’s hand was too sweaty, and Ronan couldn’t keep hold of him, even if he wanted to?

As soon as he had the thought, Noah’s hand slid from Ronan’—by thinking it, he had made it true. The ground buckled and shifted under his feet, and he knew it would be gone in a moment. Noah was sure that he was lost, for good. But Ronan lunged for him, grabbing his shoulders and drawing him close. They clung to one another as the dream tilted and melted around them, crushing their ribcages together, holding on with white-knuckled intensity. Ronan’s fingers ground the bones of Noah’s wrist together, and he only just had the time to realize it was the first time he had felt pain in almost a decade before the dream burst around them and he awoke, trembling, in the dark quiet of Ronan’s bed.

Sometimes, after Ronan woke up, in the interval while he was still paralyzed, Noah would pass the time by sticking his frigid feet on Ronan’s warm ones, or nuzzling his stubbly jaw, or flicking his earlobes. He didn’t do any of that, this morning. They were clutching one another in the bed exactly as they had been in the dream, both of them breathing hard from panic. It was a long time before Noah moved.

When he finally did pull back, Noah could tell from the look that Ronan was giving him that he hoped Noah didn’t remember his secret. The fact that he had created Matthew was something very intimate, very hard for Ronan to share. Noah didn’t really know why: Matthew was wonderful. As far as he was concerned, Ronan should be proud. But he supposed it was a lot of responsibility, crafting a human out of nothing.

Noah knew that nothing would put Ronan at ease quicker than humor. Laughter was one of the ways Ronan kept himself alive.

“Does this make you Matthew’s dad?” The tip of Noah’s nose was still touching Ronan’s. “Does it make you his _mom_? Are you going to have to go to his parent-teacher conferences from now on and explain that you birthed him from your mind—”

“Shut _up_ ,” Ronan croaked, but the corner of his mouth twitched towards a smile.

Noah didn’t know what any of it meant. Sharing Ronan’s dream felt like a natural next step to sharing his sleep. Noah thought about how Cabeswater had said he was ‘finally’ there, how the strange little girl had asked if he came there to have Ronan fix him. Fix him. He thought of the scope of Ronan’s magic, weaving little brothers out of thin air, bestowing life where before there was nothing. Noah felt a nebulous sort of hope beginning to take form in the corner of his mind.

Noah exhaled, “Well, that’s new. And terrifying.”

Ronan made a wordless noise of agreement, finally loosening his grip on Noah’s wrist. He flexed his hand, wincing. He’d re-opened the cuts by holding on too tight, and blood had come all the way through the bandage. Ronan looked to see if he had gotten any blood on the sheets, and froze.

“Noah…” Ronan said hoarsely. Noah followed his gaze, saw that there were bruises on his wrist from where Ronan had grabbed him.

“Oh, it’s okay,” Noah dismissed immediately, before it sank in. “Wait—”

He brought his wrist up to get a closer look, eyebrows drawing together in confusion. It was impossible. Ronan couldn’t have bruised his wrist. He didn’t have a wrist to bruise – at least, not a real one. His body, such as it was, couldn’t be changed: he couldn’t tan, couldn’t cut his hair, and he definitely could not bruise.

And yet there they were, undeniable: three marks, clearly made by fingers. They didn’t hurt, but now that he was paying attention, Noah could feel a distant, dull ache in his wrist.

“That is very, very weird,” Noah said, at the same moment that Ronan said, “How the fuck.”

Now and then, when they were sitting silently together, Noah would sink into the stream of Ronan’s thoughts without meaning to. More than once he had heard something along the lines of: _—if I can go back in time and write a message to myself on a rock in Cabeswater why can’t I go back and change anything that matters why can’t I dream myself back to that night and undo it stop that motherfucker before he lays a finger on Noah but if I do that would Gansey die when he was only a kid would it change the future would we never even meet I don’t want that but I can’t fucking stand it I can’t stop remembering all the blood and Noah is so good I can’t stand it God why would You let something like this happen to him to my father how could You is it any wonder that I’m such a sinner it’s not like hell could be much worse than this—_

Henrietta was a small enough town that, sooner or later, you could count on running into someone you didn’t want to see.

Adam and Gansey were pouring over the Pig, which had broken down yet again, and was proving more difficult than usual to resurrect. That left Noah, Ronan, and Blue to fend for themselves—or, more accurately, left Noah to mediate between Ronan and Blue, since both of them were particularly short-tempered that day. After twenty minutes of fielding snarky comments, Noah suggested they all go somewhere, hoping that a distraction would improve the general mood. The only problem was, he couldn’t think where they should go. Any kind of shopping was out of the question: shopping would bring up the topic of money, and wealth disparity, and that was a slippery slope Noah didn’t want to risk. The group already spent enough time wandering around in the woods that going for a hike was unappealing. Getting lunch might have been a possibility, if it weren’t for the fact that Noah didn’t feel like just sitting around and watching the two of them eat. When he suggested mini-golfing, Ronan and Blue had both glared at him witheringly. Probably for the best—on second thought, Noah wasn’t sure competition and clubs would help any.

At last, after wracking his brain (and whining that he shouldn’t be the one deciding, since he barely remembered what living people did for fun anyway), Noah said, “Movies?”

So they went to the movies.

While they were waiting in line to buy the tickets, Noah and Blue were standing close, as usual. Her arm was looped around his back and he was resting his cheek against the top of her head. But then, it occurred to Noah that Ronan might feel left out, and that wouldn’t do at all. So he drew Ronan up against his other side and slipped a cold hand into the back pocket of his skinny jeans. He raised his eyebrows at Ronan to ask, _is this okay?_ Ronan gave a tiny nod, and Noah noticed with some satisfaction that he was blushing. 

“Perfect,” Noah sighed, happily. “I’m the filling in the world’s best sandwich.”

Ronan shook his head in disdain, though there was a smile caught at the corner of his mouth, “Sometimes I cannot believe you are such a weirdo.”

“He’s much too easy to please, isn’t he?” Blue added, fondly.

“You have no idea,” Ronan muttered, and now it was Noah’s turn to blush. 

“Oh? Don’t I?” Blue asked, raising one eyebrow. Noah wondered if she was about to admit to Ronan that the two of them had kissed.

“Jesus Christ,” said another voice

Noah looked up to see who had spoken; the people before them had finished and walked away, leaving them at the front of the line. The young woman behind the glass was staring at the three of them with a shocked expression. It wasn’t a case of her wondering why two kids were cuddled up to thin air; Noah could tell that she could see him. More and more people had been able to Noah, these days, and with Blue was tucked against his side, it was no surprise that he was visible to the ticket seller.

The surprise was that she was his ex-girlfriend, Caroline.

Caroline had been the one who had cheated on him with Whelk (though Noah wasn’t entirely sure it was cheating if he knew about them, and didn’t care) and who dropped both of them when Whelk’s family lost their fortune. He hadn’t realized she still lived in Henrietta. He hadn’t known that she worked here.

“Um…” It was all too obvious that she recognized him. Noah had never been in this situation before, and he didn’t know what to say or do. He didn’t know how to explain to Blue and Ronan what was going on without making everything worse.

“What, have you never seen a guy touch another guy’s ass before?” Ronan snarled. His hackles were fully up; since he didn’t know the context, he assumed that this was some confrontationally homophobic stranger, objecting to Noah’s hand in his pocket. Noah wanted to explain that it wasn’t like that, that Ronan didn’t have to go into attack mode, but it was too late. 

“What?” Caroline asked, clearly as surprised by Ronan’s hostility as she was by the sight of Noah. A moment later, she spotted what Ronan was talking about, and understanding jolted her back into an awareness of herself. “No, I didn’t mean—” Noah could almost see the gears in her mind going. Realizing that she might get in trouble with her boss if she didn’t smooth this over. Coming up with reasons why the boy in line couldn’t be Noah Czerny, who she’d dated nearly a decade ago. Who was dead.

“Listen, I’m awful sorry.” She smiled apologetically at Ronan, who continued to glare daggers. Her smile faltered, and Caroline looked over to Blue, addressed the explanation to her directly. “I swear it’s nothing like that. It’s just that your uh- your friend… I know this sounds crazy, but I swear he looks _just_ like someone I knew in high school. I guess that with the uniform, for a second there, I thought it was him.”

He had forgotten what Caroline’s voice sounded like: how quiet it was, how her accent wore the g’s off the ends of words, how she talked so much faster when she got nervous. Caroline couldn’t seem to make herself look at Noah, whereas Noah couldn’t take his eyes off her. She had changed, aged, but not a lot. Her hair was shorter, cut into a neat bob that suited her. He wondered, with a sudden stab of misery, what he would look like now, if he’d gotten the change to age.

Probably it would be a good idea to make up something about having an older brother who had gone to Aglionby, or about having one of those faces. But he couldn’t seem to make himself lie.

“Only that’s impossible. Just, uh. Just me being silly! Now, what movie were y’all planning to see today?”

Ronan bought them all tickets quickly, and Blue let him do it without protest. They all hurried into the lobby, to a quiet corner where they could talk. Blue and Ronan looked at Noah expectantly.

“We used to go out,” he confirmed. Blue nodded as if she had guessed as much. Ronan was glaring, and Noah wasn’t sure if the anger was meant for him, or if Ronan was still cooling down from the confrontation. “We weren’t together when… I mean, she broke up with me, like, the day before...” He was confident that the two of them could fill in the rest. _The day before I was murdered._

Ronan scoffed, “Brutal.” Then he laughed, a harsh sound that told Noah he didn’t think it was very funny, at all.

“I’m honestly surprised this hasn’t happened to you before,” Blue said, shooting Ronan a nasty look for laughing. “There must be plenty of people in town who would know your face.”

“Good point,” Ronan agreed. He bumped his shoulder against Noah’s, asked, “You got any other exes I should know about, in case we run into them?”

He could tell that Ronan only half meant it as a joke. Noah was sure that Ronan had noticed how he avoided discussion of past relationships. He couldn’t really blame him for being curious, though he did sometimes find it funny that someone with so many secrets resented when others tried to hold onto theirs.

Blue shot Noah a quick, questioning look. Wondering if he’d said anything about Whelk, yet. Wondering if he was going to say anything, now.

This was the moment he had been waiting for. This was as close to a perfect opportunity as Noah was likely to get. He didn’t even have to steer the conversation to drop the bombshell, and Blue was here to help if Ronan really went off the rails. Before now, he could justify that he was waiting for the right chance. If he didn’t say something today, at this moment, it would be a kind of lying, and he knew how much Ronan hated lies. Plus, he was sure that Blue would think he was a coward, and she would be right to think it.

“No one… we’re gonna run into…” Noah said, so softly it was barely audible. He was hunching into himself, could feel solidity slipping away from him for the first time in days. “But… she wasn’t the only one I’ve ever… I’ve been meaning to… but it’s hard to talk about.” Noah unthinkingly brought a hand up to his cheek, covered the darkening smudge there. His eyes were growing hollow, skull-like, his thoughts racing. What if Ronan was too disgusted to kiss him, after he found out? What if he called Noah an idiot for trusting someone like that (he _had_ been an idiot, he had been stupid in ways that he was sure Ronan would never forgive, because Ronan had such an exacting standard for who he would call his friend and Noah had always, _always_ known that he didn’t measure up to it, not really).

At that moment, Caroline walked out of the back of the ticket office, pulling the name tag from the front of her shirt. Her shift must be over, Noah thought. She spotted the three of them huddled together and looked away quickly.

Noah hadn’t thought about Caroline in such a long time. He wondered how she had felt, after his body was found and the whole story came to light. She _must_ have heard, and it must have been horrifying for her. He hoped she hadn’t felt guilty—she didn’t deserve to. He hoped that, all those years ago, Whelk had never hurt her, secretly, without him knowing. Had Whelk ever considered sacrificing her, instead of Noah? Had she been his back-up plan? If Noah had done something different, said something different, would he alive today…

“The fuck is wrong with you?” Ronan snapped, and the anger in his voice startled Noah back to the present. “If it’s that long of a story, just forget I asked, the movie starts in like thirty seconds, and I want to get good seats.” 

Noah nodded numbly, and let Blue steer him into the right theatre. He tried to pay attention to the film, but he couldn’t concentrate on it, and the thread of the plot got away from him after about ten minutes. Noah spent most of the film with his face pressed into Blue’s shoulder. She combed a hand through his hair for the next hour and a half, and pretended not to notice the damp spot his tears made in the denim of her jacket.

“Oh, man, I forgot to tell you, I read about the best thing today for class—”

“Have you ever noticed that you discover a new best thing like _every fucking day_?”

“I know, but this is really great, I promise.” A hint of pleading had snuck into Noah’s voice.

Whelk kicked Noah’s shin, made a wordless gesture for him to hand over the bottle of bourbon. Noah passed it to him, then settled his head back on his arms. They were on the roof of the science building at Aglionby, stretched out on Noah’s picnic blanket. Some guys they knew had planned an illegal, after-hours game of hide and seek there (chosen because it had plenty of taxidermy, jars full of horrible preserved animal organs, and most importantly, hiding spots) and Whelk had volunteered to steal the keys and let everyone in after hours. Now, the two of them were just waiting for the sun to go down, and for everyone else to start to arrive.

“Alright, you’re going to tell me no matter what, so just make it quick, okay?”

Whelk had disrupted the momentum of Noah’s story and made him doubt himself before he began. “I can’t remember the name, but there’s this thing they do in Japan with pottery, where after something gets broken, like a bowl or vase or whatever, they’ll take all the broken pieces and put them back together and then pour in gold so it like, sticks back together again.”

“Why don’t they just make a new fucking bowl?” Now that Whelk had decided this was a frivolous story, there wasn’t much that would impress him.

“The point is that you can see all the places where it was cracked, but the gold makes it into art. Like it’s more valuable because it got broken.”

“That sounds way pretentious,” Whelk pronounced, with finality.

“I guess it is, a little bit.”

Whelk took another swig of the bourbon and checked his watch, “It’s nearly time. We should get up.”

“Yeah.”

“Nino’s after?”

“Definitely.”

Noah had meant his promise to Ronan that he wouldn’t vanish, but it was getting harder to keep, since the academic year had started. It was difficult to keep himself busy, during the hours when the rest of them were in school. He had tried sitting with them through a few classes, but he had, as Blue put it, ‘made himself a nuisance’ and been banned from doing so by all of them – even Ronan.

So, instead, he had taken to occupying the hours with little, useful things. Monmouth was looking cleaner and more organized than ever before, and when he had finished there, Adam’s little hovel had been next. Adam had come back one afternoon to find the place immaculate: dishes washed, laundry done, bed made. He would have been grateful, if Noah had only asked his permission, first. That way, he could have hidden the letter telling him about his upcoming court date in his car, where Noah wouldn’t find it. As soon as Adam walked through the door and saw Noah, and his handiwork, his eyes flicked over to where he had last left it.

“It wouldn’t matter if you hid it. I’ve known for a while,” Noah said bluntly. Adam kept forgetting that Noah had an uncanny knack for reading people’s minds. “You should really tell Gansey and Ronan and Blue about the letter.”

The panic made Adam feel dizzy. He had been taught to keep secrets from a very young age—to keep his crushes on other boys in his class a secret from his dad, to keep his bruises a secret from everyone. All that early training was hard to unlearn, so any breach in Adam Parrish’s privacy felt like a catastrophe.

“You should really to learn to mind your own business,” Adam said, voice shaky with emotion.

“Yeah, I know.” Noah scuffed his foot against the splintery floor, forlorn and semi-transparent. “But I’m still right. They’re going to find out about the court date eventually. If it’s after the fact, they’re going to feel shitty about it.”

Adam knew that Noah was probably right, but at that moment, he hated him for it. As far as he was concerned, Noah had no right to barge into his place and then tell him how to live his life. He had enough people telling him what he had to do—his teachers, his bosses, Gansey, Cabeswater. He wasn’t willing to add Noah to that list.

“Don’t you dare tell any of them.” If he were calmer, Adam would have realized that, if Noah hadn’t spilled his secret already, there was no reason to think he would now. But he wasn’t calm. He was on the defensive, lashing out at anything he perceived as a threat, “Just remember, I know secrets of yours, too.”

The moment he said it, Adam regretted the words. It had been too much – the conversational nuclear option. He would never really tell Ronan what Noah had said, about liking Ronan because he reminded him of Whelk. But the threat must have sounded real, from the way Noah shrank into himself, wide-eyed with fear.

“I wasn’t going to,” Noah said, very quietly. He sounded like he might cry. Adam screwed his eyes shut, shame and self-loathing rising up in him like bile.

_Don’t fight with Noah. Don’t be angry. Don’t be your father._

Before he had a chance to say he was sorry, Adam felt cold arms wrapping around him, hugging him fiercely. He didn’t know how Noah could stand to be near him, much less forgive him so quickly.

“You’re not him,” Noah whispered. “I know, I know, I should mind my own business, but I can’t shut it out sometimes, Adam. I don’t know how to do that. But I do know that you’re not your dad, okay?”

“Are you sure you’re the best judge of character?” Adam joked, weakly.

“Maybe not in the past,” Noah said, “But I think I’m getting better at it.”


	9. Chapter 9

_I wish I could rub the grief from you as if it were a smudge on the cheek._  
\- Sandra Cisneros, **Eyes of Zapata**

The girl took both of their hands and led them into the trees. Moments later (time flowed so strangely, in dreams), they were in a bright clearing with knee-high grass. Motes of pollen and bright multicolored butterflies moved through shafts of sunlight. The girl seemed to have found what she was looking for. Without a word, she plunged her arms elbow-deep into the dark, strangely loose earth. When she pulled them back out, she had something clutched between her hands. It was a stone, rough-edged and milky blue, around the size of a grape.

Ronan reached out to take it as if by habit, but the girl offered it to Noah, instead. “This is yours,” she said.

“Why, thank you,” Noah said, slipping it into his pocket. 

The girl giggled. “You’re supposed to eat it.”

Noah glanced over at Ronan for approval. Dream magic was Ronan’s area of expertise, after all. Noah wasn’t going to eat a weird dream rock given to him by a weird dream girl without checking first. Ronan shrugged unhelpfully: he didn’t know what was going on any more than Noah did. But his shrug seemed to indicate a general sense of what harm can it do.

“I trust her,” Ronan said, and that was good enough for Noah. He swallowed the stone whole.

For a few horrible seconds, it lodged in his throat. Then he felt it dissolving, working its way into his body. As it did, the clearing around them shifted, warping into a new shape. They were by the ruined church on the ley line, and the edges of the trees were blurred, soft and imprecise. Ronan and Noah watched from a few feet away as Blue and Adam, each holding one of Gansey’s arms, helped him jump into a freshly dug grave. Noah’s grave.

“It’s… a memory,” Ronan said softly. “This is after your funeral. I’m up the road, keeping watch.”

“I don’t remember this,” Noah replied.

“You had lost it,” the little girl said, “But now you’ll remember.”

There was a duffle bag sitting by the edge of the grave. Blue knelt down and unzipped it. With a sudden sinking feeling, Noah took a step closer, “Is that…?” She opened the bag wide, and Noah caught a glimpse of white bones, jumbled together, tibias and ribs and a skull with one side caved in.

“Oh god,” Noah gasped, turning his back and covering his face with his hands. He knew that they had reburied him, but he’d somehow thought that there was more of him left. That he had at least retained the shape of a human. Seeing himself thrown in a bag, a skeleton jigsaw puzzle, was terrible beyond words. Noah bent double and retched.

Ronan’s hand was hot against the back of his neck, steadying him.

“It’s fucked up. I couldn’t take it, either,” Ronan admitted, voice low and rough. “That’s why I was the lookout. I couldn’t stand seeing you like that.”

“It’s true, even if you don’t look,” the girl said. “You ought to look.”

Noah peered out from between his fingers: Adam held the bag open while Blue pulled out Noah’s bones one at a time, handing them to Gansey, who set them down in the grave with infinite gentleness. As he watched, the nausea subsided. It was a slow, deliberate process, even though it didn’t have to be; they could have buried him still in the bag. They could have thrown the bag down to Gansey to empty. They could have been talking of other things, or talking at all. But instead they were silent, and solemn, and delicate.

Noah had gotten glimpses of his other funeral, but he had not seen this later, more intimate one. Or, at least, he had not remembered seeing it. Watching how carefully, how lovingly they handled the remaining pieces of him made Noah feel like something in his chest would break.

Perhaps that was part of the magic: that it could not happen until it seemed like the farthest thing from a miracle. Only once it struck them as simple—the smallest, simplest thing on earth—could they do it.

Noah had learned many things, since he had died. He knew that there were infinite possible worlds, with infinite possible outcomes: universes upon universes just a hair’s breadth from their own. Somewhere out there were a thousand thousand worlds where his life ended, conclusively, a dozen minutes after Whelk had picked up that skateboard. There were worlds without magic, where life was life, and death was death, with no room for negotiation, or ghosts. So many people thought they lived in one of those worlds. But they were wrong.

Because what they did not know was they lived in a world that contained Ronan Lynch. And what were life or death, to a thing like Ronan Lynch?

Ronan, who was so good at finding loopholes in the fabric of existence. Ronan, who had dreamt a human life out of nothingness while he was still a child. In so many of those possible universes, Noah thought, Ronan must have been something not very far from a god. Still, he was glad that he had this Ronan, his Ronan, who was mostly just a boy—a stubborn, fucked-up, imperfect, loveable boy—with the shape of a god in his shadow.

All this time they had been walking together in Cabeswater, in Ronan’s dream, neither of them had imagined the solution. Then, on a night otherwise just like any other night, they did. And as soon as they imagined it, it was not only possible, but probable. It was the simplest thing.

Even though it was only the two of them walking in that dream together, fingers intertwined, Ronan and Noah knew they were not alone. Adam was here with them, in the encouraging whispers of Cabeswater. He had coaxed it out of its sleep, had healed its wounds, had gently opened its ancient, mysterious heart. Blue was with them, too, in Noah’s courage and hope. What chance did the conservation of energy have against Blue, their beautiful mirror, who could turn a firefly into a sun? It was not just her powers, but her kindness, that had made Noah ready for this. And Gansey was there too, his magic was something altogether harder to see, but no less essential. He had always been good at finding hidden, impossible things. He had found them all, had pulled them together with his magnetism and resolve, and woven them into a whole.

“I’ve never done this before,” Ronan said. He sounded afraid. “I don’t know if I can.”

Noah squeezed his hand, “I trust you.”

It was both easier and harder than when he had dreamt up the Pig. As he had then, Ronan did not think about all the individual components that fitted together into a complex machine called Noah. Instead, he thought of Noah as a functioning unity. There was no need to map out every vein, every synapse. If he tried to do that, he would never manage it. Instead, he remembered Noah. The shape of his body, the texture of his hair, the sound of his voice. These impressions knitted themselves together into a beautiful unity, and the anatomical details, obediently, followed along without needing to be bidden.

Please, Cabeswater, Ronan pleaded silently, Please let bend the rules, just this once. You know how much he deserves it. Look at everything he has helped both of us become. Please.

When Ronan opened his eyes, there were two Noahs in the clearing with him. There was the one standing next to him, holding his hand tightly, insubstantial but enduring. And now, there was another: a Noah-shaped body, lying still on the ground, waiting to be filled.

“Is it ready?” Noah asked.

“I think so,” Ronan said.

With a shaky exhale, Noah said, “Well, okay. Here goes nothing.” 

“Wait.”

Ronan swallowed, not meeting Noah’s gaze, “You know it won’t be perfect, right? I’m going to keep looking for a way around it, but for now, even if it works, if– if something happens to me, you’ll probably end up like my mom.”

Noah wondered if he would. Perhaps he would fall into an enchanted sleep, like Aurora Lynch. Perhaps the ghost and the dream would separate, and he would be left drifting again, no better or worse off. Or perhaps he would just die.

“I’m alright with that.”

Together, they sat on the ground, hands still interlocked. Noah bit his lip, fear running through him like an electric current (you have be brave, he told himself, in a voice that sounded like Blue’s). Then he stretched out, sinking into the body that Ronan had made for him, out of his dreams.

Noah opened his eyes.

Cabeswater was gone. He was in Ronan’s room, in Ronan’s bed, the light streaming through the window and onto the white sheets, almost blinding. It hurt his eyes. He blinked against the pain, and that was when he realized he had a body.

It was a strange thing, after so many years, feeling the weight of himself and the flurry of movement inside him, blood and breath and viscera. So many muscles and organs with so many things to do. For the first minute, it was ludicrous, overwhelming. But then he saw Ronan, lying beside him, fingers still laced in his. Focusing on him helped; once he was not thinking about them consciously, the myriad functions of his body did not bother him so much. It would take some getting used to, but he was confident he would adjust, in time.

Noah could tell from his stillness that Ronan was temporarily paralyzed, the way he always was after he brought something out of a dream. Otherwise, surely, he would have turned onto his other side, to stop Noah from seeing the tears that were falling, hot and fast, from his eyes.

With his free hand, awkward as a newborn, Noah reached up to wipe the tears from Ronan’s cheek. It seemed fitting, that this was the first action of his new life.

“I’m only telling you this because I know you can’t move yet…” How strange it was, to feel his vocal cords, to experience his own voice from inside a skull again. Strange, too, to no longer hear the background murmur of Ronan’s thoughts. “…and I know you can’t hit me with a pillow, but, I love you.”

Ronan laughed, and it came out half a sob. He kept crying for a while after that, and Noah kept wiping away the tears, until Ronan could move. As soon as he could, he kissed Noah. It was a messy kiss, too shaky and snotty by half, but Noah wouldn’t have had it any other way.

“Holy shit,” Ronan croaked, eloquently.

“Holy shit,” Noah agreed, pressing their foreheads together. He could see tears trapped in Ronan’s eyelashes. Clumsily, he ran a hand over Ronan’s buzzed hair, his ear, the dip of his neck, the swell of his shoulder. He felt so solid, now: as if Ronan had been the one to change, not him.

Noah was glad to have Ronan there as an anchor; he had gotten used to being tied to the ley line. He felt cut loose from a leash he had grown so accustomed to that he wasn’t quite sure how to keep his balance without it. He felt dizzy, giddy. He was free. He was alive.

“Oh,” Ronan said, and laid one finger on Noah’s cheek. The smudge was still there. It was just a small mark, a few shades darker than the surrounding skin, more like a birthmark than a wound. “Sorry. I guess I couldn’t picture you without it.”

Noah reached up to touch the spot. He had yet to see it, but it felt no different from the rest of his face: solid, healthy, whole.

“I don’t mind,” he reassured. It seemed only right. There was no undoing what had been done to him; the fact that he had a future now didn’t erase what had happened to him in the past.

Noah wasn’t exactly sure why he wasn’t crying, too. The shock, he figured. In a few hours he’d probably be bawling his eyes out.

“So,” he said, draping an arm across the dip of Ronan’s waist, “How are we going to tell the others?”

  

**The End**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This ending isn't as full or complete as I wanted it to be. I had been planning on an intervening chapter, where Noah told Ronan the truth about Whelk, but in the end I opted to just post the ending which I had originally written for this fanfic. All of this is old material; I had it completed back in 2015, way before TRK, when I was still in the same headspace I was writing the rest of the fic.
> 
> Even though this does not resolve ALL the loose ends of the rest of the fic, I hope it is a satisfying enough conclusion, and I want to thank everyone who has read this and said lovely supportive things over the years. This fic has meant a lot to me, and I appreciate every one of you who took the time to share it with me. 


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